18 KEMIXISCEJCCES, ETC. 



details of the most celebrated cricket matches in which he 

 was engaged from 1802 to 1820. It appears that he played 

 on the side of the gentlemen in the first match they 

 ever undertook against the players of England. It is 

 remarkable that the side on which he played was almost 

 invariably successful ; and he may be said to have been one 

 of the best batsmen of his day. 



Mr. Smith's devotion to cricket, however, only served 

 him for diversion during the summer months, while the 

 hounds were idle. At the fall of the leaf he was promptly 

 in the saddle again. He used to say, many years after- 

 wards, that on the 1st of November his Hampshire wood- 

 lands "stripped for business." He always loved to begin 

 early, for he remarked that when foxes have been once 

 rattled they are not so easily found by fox takers or keepers. 

 Before he devoted himself to fox-hunting he was a first-rate 

 shot ; but in the latter part of his life he seldom handled a 

 gun, though the extensive turnip-fields about Tedworth 

 afibrded excellent partridge shooting to his friends, and his 

 keepers always turned out capital dogs. Mr. Smith used, 

 while a youth, always to shoot the first week of a season at 

 Sutton, a large farm belonging to his father near Winchester 

 race-course, which the old gentleman subsequently sold, as 

 was said at the time, to pay for the Quorn establishment. 

 A circumstance that tells well for the seller ought not to be 

 omitted. His man of business told him th^ a Mr. Meyler 

 (whose property joined his, and who was afterwards killed 

 by a fall from his horse in the New Forest) would give him 

 a fancy price, considerably more than the estate was worth. 

 To his honour, Mr. Smith, senior, desired the attorney to 

 ofier it to this person first, and at its market value. He, 

 however, declined it, and it was bought by Mr. Wickham. 

 " His son was riding, the first time I ever saw him," relates 

 a friend who met him out with Mr. Warde's hounds at 

 South Grove, about this period, " in a green coat, on Black 

 Marquis, a famous and favourite horse of his father's, and, 



