336 



CHAPTER XV. 



DICK christian's LECTURE. 



*' The Mayor and Magistrates all said they could not ride ; and on some 



gentlemen present saying Alderman could ride, Alderman 



said he had not been on a horse for eighteen years, and he would 

 hold any one responsible who would venture to say he could 

 ride."— Rex v. Pinney (Bristol Riots), 5 C. & P., 281. 



WHEN I first espied this memorable confession, 

 I fear that I rather despised my fellow-man. 

 A little reflection, however, convinced me that either 

 its utterer or the gentleman who remarked " It's not 

 the big fences I'm afraid of — I never go near them ; 

 but it's the little ones I don't like," were just as 

 much qualified as myself to write a chapter on the 

 philosophy of cross-country horsemanship. I may 

 be as fond in my heart of the sport as Lord Elcho's 

 huntsman, who declared it was all he could do to 

 refrain from standing up and giving a " View holloa " 

 when Dr. Chalmers* delivered that stirring passage 

 from the pulpit, in 1791, on "the ancestral dignity 

 and glory of the favourite pastime of joyous old 

 England ;" but I fear that my practice might prove 

 like that of the same great divine's, who tried to cal- 

 culate, from the relative length of intervals between 

 each of his falls, how far a dozen falls would carry 

 him, and exchanged his horse after the tenth for one 



* See " Chalmers' Life," vol. i. p. 223. 



