5 editor's preface. 



might be almost called caricatures, than a connected story, with hero, 

 heroine, regular plot, and regular denouement. 



The sporting parts of the work, though, as I have observed, per- 

 fect in their accuracy, vividness of description, keenness of observa- 

 tion and minuteness of detail, intimating the complete acquaintance 

 of the author with his subject, are entirely subordinate to the general 

 effect and point of the book, and aim at amusing rather than at instruct- 

 ing, at presenting pictures and portraits than at inculcating precepts. 

 And both the pictures and portraits will be found equally true and 

 lifelike as they are telling and entertaining, and in both respects 

 equally appreciable by the fair city lady and her ladylike exquisite, 

 and by the Die-Vemon Amazon, and the veriest Nimrod of the day. 

 The ball-room and the club-room of the fashionable watering-place, 

 the manoeuvring mammas and the husband-hunting mademoiselles, 

 are as presentably put on the canvas, and far more frequently, and 

 I dare to say as humorously, as the kennel and the coverside, the 

 jolly English yeoman, and the scoundrelly English horsedealer, the 

 blossom-nosed, fox-hunting parson, and the rude, roaring, roistering, 

 fox-hunting peer, the field huntsman and the fancy huntsman, the 

 seedy screw and the spendthrift baronet with his crew of third-rate, 

 ragamuffin swells dramatic, or lastly as the matchless " Sponge" him- 

 self; for whom, in spite of his sponging and his screwing, his soaping 

 of amphitryons ivith whom one may dine to-day, his circumventing 

 of snobs and flats q^whom one may hope to dine to-morrow, and his 

 attempts at surrounding heiresses, with whom one may hope to wed 

 some day or other, we cannot but confess a sneaking liking. 



And more we think than a sneaking liking almost he deserves, 

 for his dauntless pluck, his matchless horsemanship, his great native 

 hunting qualities, his warfare against flats, screws, and snobs of all 

 kinds, the daring impudence, by which he gets out of all scrapes as 

 fast as he gets into them, and lastly for his possession of that " one 

 touch of nature " which is so truly said to " make the whole world 

 kii),' 1 and which leads him, as the end of his adventures, sporting and 

 matrimonial, to espouse the lovely and loving Lucy Glitters, though 

 he well knows that she has not a sixpence in the world, and that he 

 has no visible means of supporting her, only because she is such a 

 pretty girl, such a trump, and such a rare hand to slow a whole 

 hunting field the way over a park paling. 



