it merely be some sonnetteer or ballad-monger, if he had time and could
afford it, and lived in a tolerably open country, would not keep, at the
very least, three greyhounds? No better eating than a hare, though old
blockhead Burton--and he was a blockhead, if blockhead ever there was
one in this world--in his Anatomy, chooses to call it melancholy meat.
Did he ever, by way of giving dinner a fair commencement, swallow a
tureen of hare-soup with half-a-peck of mealy potatoes? If ever he
did--and notwithstanding called hare melancholy meat, there can be no
occasion whatever for now wishing him any further punishment. If he
never did--then he was on earth the most unfortunate of men. England--as
you love us and yourself--cultivate hare-soup, without for a moment
dreaming of giving up roasted hare well stuffed with stuffing, jelly
sauce being handed round on a large trencher. But there is no such thing
as melancholy meat--neither fish, flesh, nor fowl--provided only there
be enough of it. Otherwise, the daintiest dish drives you to despair.
But independently of spit, pot, and pan, what delight in even daunering
about the home-farm seeking for a hare! It is quite an art or science.
You must consult not only the wind and weather of to-day, but of the
night before--and of every day and night back to last Sunday, when
probably you were prevented by the rain from going to church. Then hares
shift the sites of their country seats every season. This month they
love the fallow field--that, the stubble; this, you will see them,
almost without looking for them, big and brown on the bare stony upland
lea--that, you must have a hawk's eye in your head to discern, discover,
detect them, like birds in their nests, embowered below the bunweed or
the bracken; they choose to spend this week in a wood impervious to wet
or wind--that, in a marsh too plashy for the plover; now you may depend
on finding madam at home in the sulks within the very heart of a
bramble-bush or dwarf black-thorn thicket, while the squire cocks his
fud at you from the top of a knowe open to blasts from all the
airts;--in short, he who knows at all times where to find a hare, even
if he knew not one single thing else but the way to his mouth, cannot be
called an ignorant man--is probably a better-informed man in the long
run than the friend on his right, discoursing about the Turks, the
Greeks, the Portugals, and all that sort of thing, giving himself the
lie on every arrival of his daily paper. We never yet knew an old
courser (him of the Sporting Annals included), who was not a man both of
abilities and virtues. But where were we?--at the Trysting-hill
Farmhouse, jocularly called Hunger-them-Out.
Line is formed, and with measured steps we march towards the hills--for
we ourselves are the schoolboy, bold, bright, and blooming as the
rose--fleet of foot almost as the very antelope--Oh! now, alas! dim and
withered as a stalk from which winter has swept all the blossoms--slow
as the sloth along the ground--spindle-shanked as a lean and slippered
pantaloon!
"O heaven! that from our bright and shining years
Age would but take the things youth heeded not!"
An old shepherd meets us on the long sloping rushy ascent to the
hills--and putting his brown withered finger to his gnostic nose,
intimates that she is in her old form behind the dyke--and the noble
dumb animals, with pricked-up ears and brandished tail, are aware that
her hour is come. Plash, plash, through the marsh, and then on the dry
furze beyond, you see her large dark-brown eyes--Soho, soho,
soho--Halloo, halloo, halloo--for a moment the seemingly horned creature
appears to dally with the danger, and to linger ere she lays her lugs on
her shoulder, and away, like thoughts pursuing thoughts--away fly hare
and hounds towards the mountain.
Stand all still for a minute--for not a bush the height of our knee to
break our view--and is not that brattling burst up the brae "beautiful
exceedingly," and sufficient to chain in admiration the beatings of the
rudest gazer's heart? Yes; of all beautiful sights--none more, none so
much so, as the miraculous motion of a four-footed wild animal, changed
at once, from a seeming inert sod or stone, into flight fleet as that of
the falcon's wing! Instinct against instinct! fear and ferocity in one
flight! Pursuers and pursued bound together, in every turning and
twisting of their career, by the operation of two headlong passions! Now
they are all three upon her--and she dies! No! glancing aside, like a
bullet from a wall, she bounds almost at a right angle from her straight
course--and, for a moment, seems to have made good her escape. Shooting
headlong one over the other, all three, with erected tails, suddenly
bring themselves up--like racing barks when down goes the helm, and one
after another, bowsprit and boom almost entangled, rounds the buoy, and
again bears up on the starboard tack upon a wind--and in a close line,
head to heel, so that you might cover them all with a sheet--again, all
opened-mouthed on her haunches, seem to drive, and go with her over the
cliff.
We are all on foot--and pray what horse could gallop through among all
these quagmires, over all the hags in these peat-mosses, over all the
water-cressy and puddocky ditches, sinking soft on hither and thither
side, even to the two-legged leaper's ankle or knee--up that hill on
the perpendicular strewn with flint-shivers--down these loose-hanging
cliffs--through that brake of old stunted birches with stools hard as
iron--over that mile of quaking muir where the plover breeds--and--
finally--up--up--up to where the dwarfed heather dies away among the
cinders, and in winter you might mistake a flock of ptarmigan for a
patch of snow?
The thing is impossible--so we are all on foot--and the fleetest keeper
that ever footed it in Scotland shall not in a run of three miles give
us sixty yards. "Ha! Peter the wild boy, how are you off for wind?"--we
exultingly exclaim, in giving Red-jacket the go-by on the bent. But
see--see--they are bringing her back again down the Red Mount--glancing
aside, she throws them all three out--yes, all three, and few enow too,
though fair play be a jewel--and ere they can recover, she is ahead a
hundred yards up the hill. There is a beautiful trial of bone and
bottom! Now one, and then another, takes almost imperceptibly the lead;
but she steals away from them inch by inch--beating them all blind--and,
suddenly disappearing--Heaven knows how--leaves them all in the lurch.
With out-lolling tongues, hanging heads, panting sides, and drooping
tails, they come one by one down the steep, looking somewhat sheepish,
and then lie down together on their sides, as if indeed about to die in
defeat. She has carried away her cocked fud unscathed for the third
time, from Three of the Best in all broad Scotland--nor can there any
longer be the smallest doubt in the world, in the minds of the most
sceptical, that she is--what all the country-side have long known her to
be--a Witch.
From cat-killing to Coursing, we have seen that the transition is easy
in the order of nature--and so is it from coursing to Fox-Hunting--by
means, however, of a small intermediate step--the Harriers. Musical is a
pack of harriers as a peal of bells. How melodiously they ring changes
in the woods, and in the hollow of the mountains! A level country we
have already consigned to merited contempt, (though there is no rule
without an exception; and, as we shall see by-and-by, there is one too
here), and commend us even with harriers, to the ups and downs of the
pastoral or sylvan heights. If old or indolent, take your station on a
heaven-kissing hill, and hug the echoes to your heart. Or, if you will
ride, then let it be on a nimble galloway of some fourteen hands, that
can gallop a good pace on the road, and keep sure footing on
bridle-paths, or upon the pathless braes--and by judicious horsemanship,
you may meet the pack at many a loud-mouthed burst, and haply be not far
out at the death. But the schoolboy--and the shepherd--and the
whipper-in--as each hopes for favour from his own Diana--let them all be
on foot--and have studied the country for every imaginable variety that
can occur in the winter's campaign. One often hears of a cunning old
fox--but the cunningest old fox is a simpleton to the most guileless
young hare. What deceit in every double! What calculation in every
squat! Of what far more complicated than Cretan Labyrinth is the
creature, now hunted for the first time, sitting in the centre!
a-listening the baffled roar! Now into the pool she plunges, to free
herself from the fatal scent that lures on death. Now down the torrent
course she runs and leaps, to cleanse it from her poor paws,
fur-protected from the sharp flints that lame the fiends that so sorely
beset her, till many limp along in their own blood. Now along the coping
of stone walls she crawls and scrambles--and now ventures from the wood
along the frequented high-road, heedless of danger from the front, so
that she may escape the horrid growling in the rear. Now into the pretty
little garden of the wayside, or even the village cot, she creeps, as if
to implore protection from the innocent children, or the nursing mother.
Yes, she will even seek refuge in the sanctuary of the cradle. The
terrier drags her out from below a tombstone, and she dies in the
churchyard. The hunters come reeking and reeling on, we ourselves among
the number--and to the winding horn that echoes reply from the walls of
the house of worship--and now, in momentary contrition,
"Drops a sad, serious tear upon our playful pen!"
and we bethink ourselves--alas! all in vain, for
"_Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret_"--
of these solemn lines of the poet of peace and humanity:--
"One lesson, reader, let us two divide,
Taught by what nature shows and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure and our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."
It is next to impossible to reduce fine poetry to practice--so let us
conclude with a panegyric on Fox-Hunting. The passion for this pastime
is the very strongest that can possess the heart--nor, of all the heroes
of antiquity, is there one to our imagination more poetical than Nimrod.
His whole character is given, and his whole history, in two
words--Mighty Hunter. That he hunted the fox is not probable; for the
sole aim and end of his existence was not to exterminate--that would
have been cutting his own throat--but to thin man-devouring wild
beasts--the Pards--with Leo at their head. But in a land like this,
where not even a wolf has existed for centuries--nor a wild boar--the
same spirit that would have driven the British youth on the tusk and paw
of the Lion and the Tiger, mounts them in scarlet on such steeds as
never neighed before the flood, nor "summered high in bliss" on the
sloping pastures of undeluged Ararat--and gathers them together in
gallant array on the edge of the cover,
"When first the hunter's startling horn is heard
Upon the golden hills."
What a squadron of cavalry! What fiery eyes and flaming
nostrils--betokening with what ardent passion the noble animals will
revel in the chase! Bay, brown, black, dun, chestnut, sorrel, grey--of
all shades and hues--and every courser distinguished by his own peculiar
character of shape and form--yet all blending harmoniously as they crown
the mount; so that a painter would only have to group and colour them as
they stand, nor lose, if able to catch them, one of the dazzling lights
or deepening shadows streamed on them from that sunny, yet not unstormy
sky.
You read in books of travels and romances, of Barbs and Arabs galloping
in the desert--and well doth Sir Walter speak of Saladin at the head of
the Saracenic chivalry; but take our word for it, great part of all such
descriptions are mere falsehood or fudge. Why in the devil's name should
dwellers in the desert always be going at full speed? And how can that
full speed be anything more than a slow heavy hand-gallop at the best,
the Barbs being up to the belly at every stroke? They are always, it is
said, in high condition--but we, who know something about horse-flesh,
give that assertion the lie. They have seldom anything either to eat or
drink; are lean as church-mice; and covered with, clammy sweat before
they have ambled a league from the tent. And then such a set of absurd
riders, with knees up to their noses, like so many tailors riding to
Brentford, _via_ the deserts of Arabia! Such bits, such bridles, and
such saddles! But the whole set-out, rider and ridden, accoutrements and
all, is too much for one's gravity, and must occasion a frequent laugh
to the wild ass as he goes braying unharnessed by. But look there!
Arabian blood, and British bone! Not bred in and in to the death of all
the fine strong animal spirits--but blood intermingled and interfused by
twenty crosses, nature exulting in each successive produce, till her
power can no further go, and in yonder glorious grey,
"Gives the world assurance of a horse!"
Form the Three Hundred into squadron, or squadrons, and in the hand of
each rider a sabre alone, none of your lances, all bare his breast but
for the silver-laced blue, the gorgeous uniform of the Hussars of
England--confound all cuirasses and cuirassiers!--let the trumpet sound
a charge, and ten thousand of the proudest of the Barbaric chivalry be
opposed with spear and scimitar--and through their snow-ranks will the
Three Hundred go like thaw--splitting them into dissolution with the
noise of thunder.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating of it; and where, we ask, were
the British cavalry ever overthrown? And how could the great
north-country horse-coupers perform their contracts, but for the
triumphs of the Turf? Blood--blood there must be, either for strength,
or speed, or endurance. The very heaviest cavalry--the Life Guards and
the Scots Greys, and all other dragoons, must have blood. But without
racing and fox-hunting, where could it be found? Such pastimes nerve one
of the arms of the nation when in battle; but for them 'twould be
palsied. What better education, too, not only for a horse, but his
rider, before playing a bloodier game in his first war campaign? Thus he
becomes demi-corpsed with the noble animal; and what easy, equable
motion to him is afterwards a charge over a wide level plain, with
nothing in the way but a few regiments of flying Frenchmen! The hills
and dales of merry England have been the best riding-school to her
gentlemen--her gentlemen who have not lived at home at ease--but, with
Paget, and Stewart, and Seymour, and Cotton, and Somerset, and Vivian,
have left their hereditary halls, and all the peaceful pastimes pursued
among the sylvan scenery, to try the mettle of their steeds, and cross
swords with the vaunted Gallic chivalry; and still have they been in the
shock victorious; witness the skirmish that astonished Napoleon at
Saldanha--the overthrow that uncrowned him at Waterloo!
"Well, do you know, that, after all you have said, Mr North, I cannot
understand the passion and the pleasure of fox-hunting. It seems to me
both cruel and dangerous."
Cruelty! Is there cruelty in laying the rein on their necks, and
delivering them up to the transport of their high condition--for every
throbbing vein is visible--at the first full burst of that maddening
cry, and letting loose to their delight the living thunderbolts? Danger!
What danger but of breaking their own legs, necks, or backs, and those
of their riders? And what right have you to complain of that, lying all
your length, a huge hulking fellow, snoring and snorting half-asleep on
a sofa, sufficient to sicken a whole street? What though it be but a
smallish, reddish-brown, sharp-nosed animal, with pricked-up ears, and
passionately fond of poultry, that they pursue? After the first
Tally-ho, Reynard is rarely seen, till he is run in upon--once, perhaps,
in the whole run, skirting a wood, or crossing a common. It is an Idea
that is pursued, on a whirlwind of horses, to a storm of canine
music--worthy, both, of the largest lion that ever leaped among a band
of Moors, sleeping at midnight by an extinguished fire on the African
sands. There is, we verily believe it, nothing Foxy in the Fancy of one
man in all that glorious field of Three Hundred. Once off and
away--while wood and welkin rings--and nothing is felt--nothing is
imaged in that hurricane flight, but scorn of all obstructions, dykes,
ditches, drains, brooks, palings, canals, rivers, and all the
impediments reared in the way of so many rejoicing madmen, by nature,
art, and science, in an enclosed, cultivated, civilised, and Christian
country. There they go--prince and peer, baronet and squire--the
nobility and gentry of England, the flower of the men of the earth, each
on such a steed as Pollux never reined, nor Philip's warlike son--for
could we imagine Bucephalus here, ridden by his own tamer, Alexander
would be thrown out during the very first burst, and glad to find his
way dismounted to a village alehouse for a pail of meal and water.
Hedges, trees, groves, gardens, orchards, woods, farmhouses, huts,
halls, mansions, palaces, spires, steeples, towers, and temples, all go
wavering by, each demigod seeing, or seeing them not, as his winged
steed skims or labours along, to the swelling or sinking music, now loud
as a near regimental band, now faint as an echo. Far and wide over the
country are dispersed the scarlet runners--and a hundred villages pour
forth their admiring swarms, as the main current of the chase roars by,
or disparted runlets float wearied and all astray, lost at last in the
perplexing woods. Crash goes the top-timber of the five-barred
gate--away over the ears flies the ex-roughrider in a surprising
somerset--after a succession of stumbles, down is the gallant Grey on
knees and nose, making sad work among the fallow--Friendship is a fine
thing, and the story of Damon and Pythias most affecting indeed--but
Pylades eyes Orestes on his back sorely drowned in sludge, and tenderly
leaping over him as he lies, claps his hands to his ear, and with a
"hark forward, tantivy!" leaves him to remount, lame and at leisure--and
ere the fallen has risen and shaken himself, is round the corner of the
white village-church, down the dell, over the brook, and close on the
heels of the straining pack, all a-yell up the hill crowned by the
Squire's Folly. "Every man for himself, and God for us all," is the
devout and ruling apothegm of the day. If death befall, what wonder?
since man and horse are mortal; but death loves better a wide soft bed
with quiet curtains and darkened windows in a still room, the clergyman
in the one corner with his prayers, and the physician in another with
his pills, making assurance doubly sure, and preventing all possibility
of the dying Christian's escape. Let oak branch smite the too slowly
stooping skull, or rider's back not timely levelled with his steed's;
let faithless bank give way, and bury in the brook; let hidden drain
yield to fore-feet and work a sudden wreck; let old coal-pit, with
briery mouth, betray; and roaring river bear down man and horse, to
cliffs unscalable by the very Welsh goat; let duke's or earl's son go
sheer over a quarry twenty feet deep, and as many high; yet "without
stop or stay, down the rocky way," the hunter train flows on; for the
music grows fiercer and more savage--lo! all that remains together of
the pack, in far more dreadful madness than hydrophobia, leaping out of
their skins, under insanity from the scent, for Vulpes can hardly now
make a crawl of it; and ere he, they, whipper-in, or any one of the
other three demoniacs, have time to look in one another's splashed
faces, he is torn into a thousand pieces, gobbled up in the general
growl; and smug, and smooth, and dry, and warm, and cosy, as he was an
hour and twenty-five minutes ago exactly, in his furze bush in the
cover--he is now piecemeal in about thirty distinct stomachs; and is he
not, pray, well off for sepulture?
CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET.
FYTTE SECOND.
We are always unwilling to speak of ourselves, lest we should appear
egotistical--for egotism we detest. Yet the sporting world must
naturally be anxious to know something of our early history--and their
anxiety shall therefore be now assuaged. The truth is, that we enjoyed
some rare advantages and opportunities in our boyhood regarding
field-sports, and grew up, even from that first great era in every
Lowlander's life, Breeching-day, not only a fisher but a fowler; and it
is necessary that we enter into some interesting details.
There had been from time immemorial, it was understood, in the Manse, a
duck-gun of very great length, and a musket that, according to an old
tradition, had been out both in the Fifteen and Forty-five. There were
ten boys of us, and we succeeded by rotation to gun or musket, each boy
retaining possession for a single day only; but then the shooting season
continued all the year. They must have been of admirable materials and
workmanship; for neither of them so much as once burst during the Seven
Years' War. The musket, who, we have often since thought, must surely
rather have been a blunderbuss in disguise, was a perfect devil for
kicking when she received her discharge; so much so, indeed, that it was
reckoned creditable for the smaller boys not to be knocked down by the
recoil. She had a very wide mouth--and was thought by us "an awfu'
scatterer;" a qualification which we considered of the very highest
merit. She carried anything we chose to put into her--there still being
of all her performances a loud and favourable report--balls, buttons,
chucky-stanes, slugs, or hail. She had but two faults--she had got
addicted, probably in early life, to one habit of burning priming, and
to another of hanging fire; habits of which it was impossible, for us
at least, to break her by the most assiduous hammering of many a new
series of flints; but such was the high place she justly occupied in the
affection and admiration of us all, that faults like these did not in
the least detract from her general character. Our delight, when she did
absolutely and positively and _bona fide_ "go off," was in proportion to
the comparative rarity of that occurrence; and as to hanging fire--why,
we used to let her take her own time, contriving to keep her at the
level as long as our strength sufficed, eyes shut perhaps, teeth
clenched, face girning, and head slightly averted over the right
shoulder, till Muckle-mou'd Meg, who, like most other Scottish females,
took things leisurely, went off at last with an explosion like the
blowing up of a rock.
The "Lang Gun," again, was of a much gentler disposition, and, instead
of kicking, ran into the opposite extreme on being let off, inclining
forwards as if she would follow the shot. We believe, however, this
apparent peculiarity arose from her extreme length, which rendered it
difficult for us to hold her horizontally--and hence the muzzle being
attracted earthward, the entire gun appeared to leave the shoulder of
the Shooter. That such is the true theory of the phenomenon seems to be
proved by this--that when the "Lang Gun" was, in the act of firing, laid
across the shoulders of two boys standing about a yard the one before
the other, she kicked every bit as well as the blunderbuss. Her lock was
of a very peculiar construction. It was so contrived that, when on full
cock, the dog-head, as we used to call it, stood back at least seven
inches, and unless the flint was put in to a nicety, by pulling the
trigger you by no means caused any uncovering of the pan, but things in
general remained _in statu quo_--and there was perfect silence. She had
a worm-eaten stock, into which the barrel seldom was able to get itself
fairly inserted; and even with the aid of circumvoluting twine, 'twas
always coggly. Thus too, the vizy (_Anglice_ sight) generally inclined
unduly to one side or the other, and was the cause of all of us everyday
hitting and hurting objects of whose existence even we were not aware,
till alarmed by the lowing or the galloping of cattle on the hills; and
we hear now the yell of an old woman in black bonnet and red cloak, who
shook her staff at us like a witch, with the blood running down the
furrows of her face, and, with many oaths, maintained that she was
murdered. The "Lang Gun" had certainly a strong vomit--and, with slugs
or swan-shot, was dangerous at two hundred yards to any living thing.
Bob Howie at that distance arrested the career of a mad dog--a single
slug having been sent through the eye into the brain. We wonder if one
or both of those companions of our boyhood be yet alive--or, like many
other great guns that have since made more noise in the world, fallen a
silent prey to the rust of oblivion.