INTERCEPTED CORRESPONDENCE FROM NORTHAMPTONSHIRE. 359 vinces, including two at Canterbury, two at Brighton, one at Audley End, and one at Leicester. This augurs well, and when we consider that the last year's matches cost £578, we cannot but compliment the committee, not only upon their liberality, but also upon their zealous and active exertions in keeping this national game alive. There is another amusement connected with sporting which may be enjoyed from London with little trouble and expense. I allude to a visit to Jackson's hunting grounds, and which has already been dilated upon in the Sporting Review and Magazine. It is true that, since the appearance of that article, death has overtaken the spirited proprietor of those grounds; still the establishment is equally well kept up by his widow, and a man may have a gallop of an hour over a grass country, in which may be found every species of fence, for 7s. 6d. Ladies, too, who prefer the air of these open grounds to the dust of those "vegetable puncheons called Parks," where there is neither fruit nor flower enough to gratify a bee's slight munchings," can ride in the covered school or outside ground during the summer at the small charge of 1s. per diem; and if they have no stud of their own, Mrs. Jackson will furnish as good steeds by the day or year as can be hired within twenty miles of the metropolis. To the uninitiated it may be as well to add that the grounds are upon the Harrow Road, within two miles of the spot where once the far famed Tyburn-gate stood. · We have now briefly attempted to describe the sporting life that may be had from the metropolis, and to those who have no ties in the country, no broad acres to look after, no lands to cultivate, no tenantry to support, no ancestral home to keep up, we strongly recommend London as a head quarter, from which all the amusements we have faintly alluded to may be had, and which combined with the advantages of clubs, theatres, and society, render it the most favoured spot in the wide world. The long line is the first verse I have written for years; it is more remarkable for its truth than its poetry-a praise seldom due. The original latin grammar affair is no better poetry-and not at all true. "Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes, emollit," &c., says that erudite work. Now, with all due deference to our earliest instructor in that portion of a gentleman's education yclept "classical," the learning of the liberal sciences has nothing to do with softness of manners or abolition of barbarity. The greatest bears in the world are the professors "lite rarum humaniorum." Men who bury their heads between their hands over a volume of the ancients, generally bury their brains and manners with them; and when dug up again for ordinary use, the rust they have acquired in their learned tomes-qy. tombs ?-is proverbial. The cultivation of woman's society is, believe me, the only preservative against barbarity sports, which are a refinement upon the necessities of savage life, lose their hardening influence upon the mind when woman smiles upon them. The painter and sculptor become only men of refinement when beauty is the subject of their pencil. You remember C——————, a fellow of College; he passed twenty years in fitting himself for twenty more of bachelorhood and port wine. Never was a more jovial, good-tempered old cock. He wore a dressing-gown and slippers all day, and was never without a pocket Horace or Anacreon-and if there ever were two classical authors calculated to make a gentleman, they are they; but, to do him justice, what a savage he was! At what price did he appreciate Raleigh's gallantry to Elizabeth? At forty he got a good living, and then he shewed us that he really did know a pretty woman from an ugly one, by marrying a girl of nineteen. Of course the liberal sciences had softened his manners, so says the great authority above quoted of course they did no such thing- Virgil, Horace, Homer, Anacreon, had not taught him to open a door for his wife, or abstain, in her society, from his usual after-dinner nap; he is dotingly fond of her, and sends her to fetch his favourite authors and his slippers for his evening's amusement. Johnson was a learned brute; as nobody denies the qualification, let nobody deny the substantive factfor he quarrelled with his wife on their wedding day, and sulked when the poor woman went into tears. If he had spared a few hours from his early application to Latin hexameters and Greek articles, for the study of Grecian noses and the cadences of the lip, he might have been less of a scholar but more of a gentleman. In fact, the Latin grammar is wrong, and I'm right; and whenever you see one man more refined in manner than another, you'll find that he had a mother or a sister to make a gentleman of him, after he'd made a savage of himself at Eton or Oxford. The latter would be the nicest place on earth, if one could only stipulate for an hour's conversation daily with a ladylike woman ; all that I have decent and respectable about me I attribute to this cause, and I've no doubt you do the same. You know what I'm driving at-why not riding, at? Our forefathers were excellent sportsmen, but certainly not better than we; getting up at six o'clock and making a breakfast of beef and beer no more exalt the character than tea and toast, or talking to a lady at the coverside, will detract from it. The latter softens our manners, but not our hearts. I only wish I had my old grandfather for four miles across country for a hundred or two. The greatest laudator temporis acti” will scarcely venture to deny that we beat them at riding: for every one that went well then, there are ten now. It's absurd to give instancesthey abound; men who sit as well on a sofa as they do on a saddle : Lord W-It-n, the F-r-st-rs, the V--Il-rs, and hundreds more, occur to every one. Like steel and the diamond, the more polished and brilliant, the harder and more useful it becomes. After this, my dear - you'll not think it strange that I advocate coffee-room" part of a meet. I don't altogether mean the inside the " of some gentleman's breakfast-room, who kindly hangs out luncheon for the three dozen privileged, though that's pleasant enough, but I mean the whole commencement of the day's business-the ovog aπoroc, as the Greeks have it-labour which is no labour, hunting which is no hunting. This is the part which I advocate; the least serious part of the performance, but as necessary to it as a whole as soup and fish to a good dinner. Eminently qualified as the Pytchley country is to give you the beef, boiled turkey, and entrées, I think no country in England -and, of course, in the world-has any chance with it in the prefatory course. The weather in March presented nothing very favourable to fox-hunting; sharp frosts, and sharper winds, blew the dust about in the middle of the day most uncompromisingly, and no hounds had sport on the first Monday and Wednesday of the month. To be sure, nobody expected it; and I should think they went to Foxhall and Dodford only for the want of something to do. A fox did get away from Nobottle late on Wednesday, with a few couple of hounds, which ran him into a drain; but no one was with them, and most of us were gone home. On Friday, the 5th, the wind was high over Naseby and Cold Ashby, but the hounds were at Kelmarsh at a quarter before eleven. Kelmarsh is the seat of Lord Bateman; plenty of foxes, and a fine country to ride over-open and bold, not very large fences, but a little too much sprinkling of plough land about Naseby to be quite the cream of Northamptonshire. At all events, it's a good place, when the sun shines, for an illustration of the coffee-room part of a Pytchley meet. Be there by eleven o'clock, or rather before; ladies like looking at hounds, so they don't move off very punctually. Perhaps sherry, cherrybrandy, coffee, and biscuits, or the ladies themselves, may have something to do with the gentlemen lingering for a quarter of an hour; at all events, they do linger. Ascending the steps, you walk from the threshold plump into a Turkey carpet; on the left hand side of you is a billiard-table, on the other side you take your cue from the company, who are making the most of their time with the viands. You are in a hall opening to different rooms in the house along the top runs, on one side, an open gallery. I do not know the date of the building, but I should think about the time of the early Georges; I don't mean the third of that name, though he got up at six and went to bed at nine o'clock; neither do I mean the fourth George, who saw the sun rise almost as often as his virtuous father, but from a different habit of life. Whoever built it, it looks very comfortable. Whilst you are engaged in one corner of the hall, Lady B- is receiving, with her usual courtesy, the more intimate friends of her son. With your mouth full of sandwich, and your right hand employed in filling your wine-glass, your attention is attracted by wheels. "By Jove, what a pair of ponies!" So they are, but they don't match the owner for beauty. "Who is it?" you manage to slide in, sotto voce. The question proves you to be a stranger to Northamptonshire. It is the young, pretty, elegant-looking Lady H, and here it comes Mrs. H- L. I promised to tell you about pretty faces under pink bonnets presiding over pairs of ponies. Here are two of them; would that you could see them! they would repay you for a journey to cover at any distance. E B Beneath the large trees in the park is Lady V; and on horseback, coming down the drive, are Mrs. and her sister Mrs. F——————, a stranger to this country, but none to the pleasures of the chase. If beauty like theirs, or the contemplation of it, is to spoil a sportsman or a run, may I never see a fox killed, and die a muff. These ladies do us the honour of generally giving us their company, and occasionally others, Lady AH- latterly on horseback. But as an example is sometimes followed very much to the detriment of those who set it, I will not deny that bad habits have sprung from good ones; that ladies on hunters have given rise to a false ambition in women on hacks, and that sometimes a very shocking bad hat has been seen amongst us. But here come some more men. "Well, H Thursday?" will you have one of yours in our steeple-chase on "No, my dear fellow, certainly not; but Sir Thas plenty of horses, and here he is, to answer the question. I mean to have as many days' hunting as I can get out of mine." "I'll run Camilla,' if you like," says Sir Tthink you ought to make Rolt' carry 12lbs. extra.” 66 'No, we won't have Camilla,' she's thorough-bred; and this is only for a ten-pound note and the fun of the thing," rejoined Lord B with this drying wind.' though we can't have a run "Oh! scent's very uncertain-nobody knows." "Uncommon," says a respectable farmer at hand, who at once launches into a run with Sir Charles Knightley in a storm of thunder, lightning, hail, rain, snow, and a hard frost, when nobody saw it but himself and the whip. 66 Here comes the parson in his white choker; it would'nt do to ask him to put in his chesnut here: he's a very good one, only it's a pity he does'nt carry more flesh." "Which do you mean, the parson or the chesnut?" The parson, naturally enough, declines the honour of risking his neck or his reputation, but accepts his lordship's invitation to sandwiches and cherry brandy. Then come a score of muffs that nobody knows, then a score more that everybody knows; then a character in a shootingjacket and leggings; then an excitable apothecary in a full suit of black and a frock-coat, with a white hat and a walking-stick, on a bare-boned hack. The motley group makes up some two hundred amongst them, all come there for sport of some kind or another. The Coffee-room" part of the business is over; the hounds are gone on; the carriages are gone off along the road to the gorse. Lady H and Mrs. B- are on horse-back, or would be, had they been there; for I should tell you that the coffee-room scene is a sketch of what sometimes happens, the find I am going to describe a real one. Waterloo Cover affords a hero, and away he went for Marston Wood. A rather singular thing happened on the top of the hill by the windmill; the hounds divided, and, while each party congratulated himself upon being one in a good thing, a brace of foxes were running nearly parallel for the same point. Having lost our fox, or foxes, we found a second at Naseby Gorse, which ran to Kelmarsh; here he was turned by some means, and went to Scotland Wood. From that time the running got slack, and, after going backwards and forwards and round the Kelmarsh covers, we ran ourselves to ground at the luncheon-table-two good things considering the weather-excellent. We had a large field out-Messrs. Colville, Farquhar, Bromley, Rolt, Lord Henley, and others, going well as usual. The very good thing from Cold Ashby, the next day, I was unlucky enough to miss; this I regretted the more, as it was quite clear, from the settled state of the weather, that there was no chance whatever of sport for some time. This conjecture of mine proved true at North Kilworth, Pytchley, Brixworth, Ashby St. Ledgers, Misterton, and other places. employed in good, it and if there is an exSo we had a steeple The human mind is wonderfully active; if not is in bad; if it can't kill foxes, it must kill time; cuse for steeple-chasing, last month affords it. chase near Kelmarsh. Somebody had too many horses, and wanted to kill one, or to commit suicide in a sportsmanlike manner, or to pocket a heap of money; or perhaps Lord Bateman wished to give the farmers a treat, and if so, and one can judge by numbers and broad grins, he fully succeeded. However, joking apart, it ended in a very pleasant day; and as Kelmarsh was full of company, ready for the Market Harboro' ball in the evening, it took amazingly. You know I never trouble you about these affairs; if I can see good hunting, I never care much about steeple-chasing, so am seldom there. On this occasion I plead guilty to boring you; but it is for this reason, that you must have read a wrong account, and a very bad one, in the "Northampton Herald" and "Bell's Life." Of course the editors of those papers are not answerable for these descriptions; and, even now, there is great difficulty in persuading some that Tobacconist did not win. He not only did'nt win, but he did'nt run; for he was safely lodged with his owner at Welford, who, in consequence of the hard frost, sent over to ask whether the race would be run, and by accident did not get an answer in time to start. He was at Lamport after the race was over, but had nothing to do with its merits. You like something concise; brevity is the soul of wit, as the T.Y.C. is the soul of racing. Thursday, March 11, was fixed for the Kelmarsh Steeple-chase, a £10 sweepstakes, gentleman riders, at 12st.; and that they were bonâ fide gentlemen riders was one of the pleasantest parts of the business. I fear I never shall see the pleasure of riding even my own horse in the company to which a mixed steeple-chase introduces one; independently of our acknowledged, or generally admitted, inferiority in the saddle, nothing would compensate to me for submission to this worst feature of steeple-chasing. In the present instance they were positively gentlemen; and, with an entry of six, we had five at the post at about halfpast two o'clock. All would have been there; but Mr. Parker, on Tobacconist, had the same doubts with many others as to the possibility of running the ground was most unpropitiously hard. There came to the post Mr. Harvey's Merry Andrew (Owner) 1 (Mr. Bromley) 2 (Owner) 3 (Mr. Colville) 0 (Owner) |