324 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



for example, were kept in the time of Edward II., as we know 

 from the treatise on Hare-hunting composed by his huntsman 

 Guillaume Twici. The authors of the volume on ' Hunting,' in 

 the Badminton Library, are clearly in error when they state 

 (p. 33) that Fox-hunting, as we know it now, may be said to 

 have come in with this century. 



Lord Wilton has expressed the opinion that there were no 

 regular Foxhounds till the close of the last century,* but this 

 also is a mistake, for it is clear, from the description given in 

 Somervile's ' Chace ' (Book III.), that Fox-hunting was a recog- 

 nised field sport at the time that this poem was written : — 



" Hark ! what loud shouts 

 Re-echo thro' the groves ! he breaks away ; 

 Shrill horns proclaim his flight. Each straggling hound 

 Strains o'er the lawn to reach the distant pack. 

 'Tis triumph all and joy. * * * 



What lengths we pass ! where will the wandering chace 

 Lead us bewilder'd ? Smooth as the swallows skim 

 The new shorn mead, and far more swift, we fly. 

 See the brave pack, how to the head they press 

 Justling in close array ; then more diffuse 

 Obliquely wheel, while from their opening mouths 

 The vollied thunder breaks." 



This celebrated poem was first printed in 1785, when George 

 II. was king, and I find in my Common-place Book a note to the 

 effect that in 1740 a pack of twenty-five couples of Foxhounds 

 belonging to Thomas Fownes, Esq., of Stapleton, Dorset, was 

 advertised for sale in the ' Evening Post ' of Nov. 11th and 13th 

 of that year. 



This pack of Foxhounds is believed to have been the first 

 established in the South of England. The Kev. William Chafin, 

 in his very entertaining 'Anecdotes of Cranbourne Chase,' a 

 book which is now difficult to procure, remarks (2nd ed. 1818, 

 p. 42):- 



at Simonsbath. From that time down to 1825 the sport flourished under 

 various masters, particularly under Sir Thomas Acland (the second of the 

 name), and the late Lord Fortescue, who kept the hounds at Castle Hill in 

 1802, and again from 1812 to 1818. 



* See » The Field,' Sept. 22nd, 1883, in a review of Col. Babington's 

 Kecords of the Fife Fox-hounds,' Blackwood & Sons, 1883. 



