246 Silk and Scarlet. 



yard, and yet at other times kill their brace of foxes 

 without a check ; and in Cokethorpe again, we have 

 known them run all day with scarcely any scent, till 

 the fog rose in an October evening, and then account 

 for him in twenty minutes. On Appleton Common 

 they can carry a head in any weather, while Tubney 

 Wood, just over the next ditch, is the worst scenting 

 wood in the world. 



Nimrodthe The first great practical hunter we 

 Second. have traces of in England, is '* the brave 

 Burrington," and we only hit on him in a 1733 

 " Essay on Hunting." The author of it " presumes on 

 pardon from the loquacious world, if among so many 

 treatises, vindications, replies, journals, craftsmen, hyp- 

 doctors, and lay preachers, the press be borrowed a 

 day or two for a plain essay on the innocent recrea- 

 tion of us country squires." A fox, it is true, lies 

 curled up at the end of his Essay ; but he runs hare 

 throughout. Burrington is evidently the Dagon oi 

 his idolatry. It was he, and he alone, who by his 

 marvellous knowledge of roads and morasses, caused 

 " the celerity of the march of the Prince of Orange ," 

 and such was his iron vigour years after he had passed 

 his grand climacteric, that his eulogist is tempted 

 triumphantly to inquire, " How many Beaux, Flats, 

 and Spit-Frog Commission officers would he not at 

 that age have driven to market with his single hunt- 

 ing pole .?" 



Early Henry Fielding had, it is true, made 



Fox-hunters. Reynard " drop his bushy tail" in a hunt- 

 ing song before 1750; still it was sound orthodoxy in 

 that age to hunt what first came to hand ; and it was 

 not until some twenty years later, when old Cooper 

 was seen cheering Bluecap and Wanton in their five 

 hundred a-side match against two of Mr. Meynell's 

 hounds over Newmarket, that the line of demarcation 

 between hare and fox began to grow sharp and clear. 

 The Tarporley Hunt proclaimed their allegiance in 



