bite the man's head off. We'd better stay."

Mrs. O." No, no, my love; we mustn't stay: it's uncommon dangerous, and I won't stop another minute on no account. Besides, I've another reason (whispers); as soon as he's done, he'll come round a-collecting. So, come along!-Mary-Liza-Tommy

SIR,

Mr. Oilcake come, we've seen enough-Tommy, come along!" (Mr. and Mrs. Oilcake, Miss and Miss Eliza ascend the steps.) Keeper (with his head in the Lion's mouth).-"Hollo! hollo! hollo-h!" Mrs. O. (taking a furtive peep from the top of the steps). "Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!" MENANDER.

I HAVE to apologize for my unintended, though unavoidable, silence during the last two months, and the consequent interruption to the series of my letters;-be assured, however, that nothing short of absolute inability to work should have compelled me to keep my whip still for so long a period; and "the mutability of worldly affairs," as Baillie Mucklethrift has it, being taken into account, I trust in your December number to resume both "Hare-hunting," and "The Road," and continue, in successive ones, each subject regularly to its conclusion. Meantime, Mr. Editor, though I do not forward to you the regular No. 3, of the first mentioned article, I candidly confess myself so devoted to the science, and so utterly and incorrigibly a thistle-whipper, that I cannot deny myself the pleasure of employing the few minutes I have fortunately vacant, in sending you what little information I have lately picked up respecting both the operations and changes in some of the harrier kennels of my acquaintance. Being well entered to the scut in my boyhood, at Horsham, where I remember I used to turn

out, day after day, with a pole quite as thick and about twice as high as myself, and scramble from morning to night after the thousand and one cries of old Southerns, that in those days gave no peace to the echoes of the Sussex weald; and having afterwards been pretty well blood-ed at Oxford with the Marcham and an infinity of other packs in the neighbourhood (to say nothing of my having for a series of years both carried the horn and worn the kennel-coat in person), I have never, though as rapturously and madly fond of fox-hunting as any man, been able to boast myself at all steady from hare, and, in spite of the curses and anathemas that I am well aware are thundered against them in various quarters, I acknowledge that I still take the very highest degree of interest in harriers and their proceedings.

It is strange indeed to witness the contempt and abhorrence with which some persons regard them. In masters of fox-hounds themselves, it is perhaps to be partly accounted for by the disturbance and damage they are supposed to cause in the covers, &c. &c., to say nothing of the possibility of their ocasionally finding and giving

a good account of him; but it has really often made me mad to hear people abuse them who never entered into the spirit of a run, or ever rode over a broomstick in their lives; and who put on the scarlet coat in the morning, as the King of France is said to have marched up the hill, merely to pull it off again in the evening unstained and unspotted. "I had

rather see a fox, than ride to the best run ever had with harriers," was an observation once made to me after a miserable day's work amongst some miserable woodlands in the north, in reply to a remark of mine-" How much better we should have been off with Lord Maitland on the hills, instead of having wasted an apparently good scenting morning with the foxhounds in the vale." Surely than this "the force of folly can no further go;" more especially when I add that the absurd speech was made by a man for whom foxhunting, even in its slowest day, was, with its necessary concomitants of "ox-fence and field of deep," altogether far too fast; and whose only chance of even seeing a hound in chace consisted in its being a perfectly uninclosed country that he had to get over. I have almost invariably found, however, that those who are the greatest tailors with the fox-hounds are the most virulent declaimers against the harriers; and though, as I said

above, they do sometimes put one's patience to the very proof, it is rather good fun to listen to the empty ebullitions of their pseudoenthusiastic zeal. It will require, nevertheless, an authority a little more convincing than these gentry can produce, to choak me off an efficient and well-appointed pack (none of your psalm-singing, leathern-eared southerns be it understood), in an open and really rideable country, where the hares run stout; and as to a preference being given to the horrors of woodland fox-hunting, I will freely give my consent to join the senseless and unmeaning cry, when, and when only, the rhetoric of these misbelievers shall have succeeded in persuading me that a bottle of soured and corked La Fitte is more palatable than a honest glass of sound and genuine old British black-strap.*

To proceed, however, to the main subject of this letter without further preface; I have to observe, in the first place, that the harehunting on the Downs of Sussex bids fair this season to give very general satisfaction.

In this immediate neighbourhood Captain Richardson, of Findon, has got together a remarkably neat and pretty pack of dwarf fox-hounds (principally, I fancy, from the East Sussex and Colonel Wyndham's kennels), with which, I venture to predict, if he rigidly

adheres to the system of drafting every thing in the shape of flash, he must, nolens volens, show some capital sport in his very beautiful and harrier-like country. During last winter he kept some eight or ten couples of the same sort merely to hunt away an idle hour or two of the morning before dinner, whenever the idea struck him; and even with this diminutive and scanty number, he had, I believe, occasionally, some very pretty things. This year, however, now that his neighbour, Mr. Goring, has laid down his lot, of whom, out of deference to the old adage, “de mortuis nil nisi bonum," I shall say no more than that they are defunct, he has formed a complete and businesslike establishment, and I repeat, it will go hard indeed, if in the hands of so good a sportsman, the country is not at last satisfactorily hunted. The downs of which it consists are, of all spots on earth, the very place for a fast and racinglike pack; though I confess, were they mine, I would rather have them with a slight and remote cross of the harrier, than of entirely pure and unadulterated foxhound blood. The best thanks, however, of all hare-hunters in his neighbourhood are due to Captain Richardson for bringing amongst them so superior a lot to anything they have recently seen; and I hope, Mr. Editor, to record in your pages many a clipping gallop with them during the progress of the

season.

The Portslade have already commenced operations in the neighbourhood of Shoreham, with some fairish sport, and, as usual, are under the management, in the field, of Messrs. Vallance and Bridger. I have myself been as yet unable

to meet them; but the hounds, I hear, are looking tolerably well, though short in the extreme in point of numbers for the beginning of the season. If I mistake not, they lost several couples during the summer months; and, if all suspicions are correct, by the agency of poison! on which I have only to observe, that I trust the nefarious miscreant who could do so dastardly an act, may swing ere long in the same rope to which the law of the land already condemns the incendiary, and to which the law of fox-hunting should also condemn the vulpecide in any and every country where a regular and established pack is kept. The Portslade, I should add, though far from a first-rate establishment, do their work in a very quiet and oftentimes satisfactory manner; and to those amongst my readers who wish to earn an appetite for dinner without the nuisance and inconvenience of being jostled about by a Brighton mob of horsemen, I can safely recommend them. Their fixtures throughout the season will be, on Tuesdays, at White Lot Bottom (not far removed from the famous Devil's Dyke), and on Saturdays, at Erringham, almost immediately above Shoreham Bridge.

Several very large and tumultuous assemblages have also already taken place near Patcham and other places, under the pretext of hunting with a pack that calls itself The Brighton Subscription Harriers ;" and to give a more plausible appearance and colour to these meetings, sundry hares have been mobbed to death, and an infinity of shillings and half crowns have been collected in the shape of field-money "par Messieurs les entrepreneurs," as Gil Blas says. I call, however, on the

magistracy of Sussex, at this momentous crisis, to look with a very jealous eye on these assemblies à cheval; for surely their vigilance ought not to be lulled asleep by the idle assertion that they are held for the purposes of sport.No, indeed! the bare idea of eighty or a hundred people meeting thrice a-week on an open down to enjoy hare-hunting, requires the balling-iron with a vengeance; and I hereby warn all well-disposed people who have a regard for their own necks, to keep wide away from the Downs on the mornings of these fictitious appointments!

Mr. Harrison's hounds, the Brookside pack, near Lewes, are as usual, and as must ever be the case under his unceasing care and solicitude, looking well and as they should do. Taken altogether, they are, to my mind, as correct a lot of harriers as can very easily be met with; and were I on the point of getting a pack together for myself, Mr. H. must name a very formidable price indeed before I should be tempted to leave his kennel without four or five couples of his most beautiful bitch hounds. As a friend of mine ob

serves of him, "his very existence appears to depend upon the welfare of his kennel”. and as an old master of harriers myself, I can' duly appreciate and honour him for the feeling. Success, say I,

attend him and all other enthusiasts with their hounds!

Going a little further a-field, I am happy to say that, though they are not exactly my sort of harrier, my old friend, George Dawson, of Horsham, has got a more efficient pack in his kennel than he has ever before possessed. Last year they were, in their way, I thought, exceedingly good; and I mentioned

NO. VII.-VOL. II.

them as such, in, I think, the first communication I had the pleasure of making in these pages; their improvement, however, this season, is most marked, and their running most efficient; and they have already, in the neighbourhood of Horsham, and in their new and capital country (for the Weald) near Shipley, killed handsomely at least, their thirty brace of hares! Surely if the proverb about "the proof of the pudding," &c., be a correct one, there cannot be much to find fault with about this unwearied and indefatigable sportsman's kennel; and I am happy to add, that he, too, comes in for a share of my blessing, as an enthusiast.

The mention of slow hounds and enthusiasts, puts me in mind of Mr. Amyatt, the late wellknown master of the late wellknown Conock Harriers. Being desirous of seeing his kennels once more occupied, he wrote to me last spring (as I mentioned in your first number), with a request that I would inform him of the most likely method to procure-of all things in Heaven above, or in earth beneath, for so fast a man to covet or desire !a complete pack of the genuine old fifty-inch-eared Southern! and in pursuance of my advice he came in person to the Weald of Sussex, as the most likely mart for the commodity. The genuine Southern hound, however, he found all but extinct; and as he was too good a judge to carry any thing in the shape of a counterfeit away with him, he was for a length of time unsuccessful. By dint, however, as he himself says, "of rummaging the whole county of Sussex, from Arundel to Hastings," and unheeding the slight annoyance" of being occasionally taken

H

for a rat-catcher," in his travels, he contrived, at last, to get together some seven or eight couples of the real good old sort, and when he last wrote to me, he was on the point of setting off for Lancashire, where he hoped to make up his number.

Now I am positively dying, now that the season has commenced, to hear how he admires their performances.-A pack of Southern hounds, just Heaven! in the kennel and country-Salisbury plain be it remembered of the farfamed Conock clippers! Were I to live to the years of Methuselah, I think I should never forget the face of his feeder, whom he brought with him into Sussex, when introduced for the first time into a kennel of the long-ears. His dismay at hearing his master actually ask the price of some of them, at last broke through all bounds of decorum." For God's sake, doant'ee, sir, doant'ee, sir, for God's sake

you will hang them all before you have got them home-oh! Lord, how we shall be laughed at!!!" To speak the truth, my own ideas were not far different from the honest feeder's; and I only rejoice that my friend at last accomplished his wishes, because I am morally certain that the old Southerns will pave the way for a second, it cannot be an improved, edition of the old Conock establishment.

I lament to find, from a very sportsman-like letter that I had about a month since from my old acquaintance, Robert Smith, of the Boroughbridge, that he has at last resigned the management of that most respectable and long-established pack. Without paying an undue compliment to the services of my friend, the fate of this es

tablishment is, by his secession, I fear, sealed; and it is not difficult to foresee that it will, ere long, be reckoned amongst "the things that have been." Let those who may be looking forward to the establishment of a pack for next year, keep an eye on the old Boroughbridge; their blood is undeniable, and, as the foundation of a kennel, almost invaluable.

The worst piece of intelligence, however, as regards hare-hunting, is yet to come; and I am confident that all who have ever seen the establishment, will lament sincerely with me, that before this is in print, the truly beautiful and complete kennel of Lord Maitland, that work of perfection, that it has cost the notoriously best judge of the science extant, sixteen long years to consummate, will have been consigned, in common with his first-rate stud of hunters, to the hammer of the auctioneer. The long and incessant absences from Scotland occasioned by his duties in Parliament, have urged their noble owner, it is understood, at last, to this much to be deplored resolution; be his motive, however, what it may, I am, I feel sure, most amply borne out in the assertion, that the purchaser of Lord Maitland's harriers may assure himself that he has the best pack in the known world, and that he has the combined authority of every judge who has seen them for the last ten years in laying this flattering unction to his soul.

Mr. Editor, this letter has now run to an unconscionable and unexpected length-farewell, then, till we meet in the December number.

DASHWOOD.

Worthing, Oct. 16, 1831.