Roads and canals excited great alarm to our fathers

Roads and canals excited great alarm to our fathers

With every change sportsmen of the old school have prophesied the total ruin of fox-hunting. Roads and canals excited great alarm to our fathers. In our time every one expected to see sport entirely destroyed by railroads; but we were mistaken, and have lived to consider them almost an essential auxiliary of a good hunting district.

Looking back at the manner in which fox-hunting has grown up with our habits and customs, and increased in the number of packs, number of hunting days, and number of horsemen, in full proportion with wealth and population, one cannot help being amused at the simplicity with which Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who comes from a country where people seldom amuse themselves out of doors (except in making money), tells in her Sunny Memories, how, when she dined with Lord John Russell, at Richmond, the conversation turned on hunting; and she expressed her astonishment that, in the height of English civilisation, this vestige of the savage state should remain. Thereupon they only laughed, and told stories about fox-hunters. They might have answered with old Gervase Markham, Of all the field pleasures wherewith Old Time and man’s inventions hath blessed the hours of our recreations, there is none so excellent as the delight of hunting, being compounded like an harmonious concert of all the best partes of most refined pleasures, as music, dancing, running and ryding.

Fonte: Tamming Horses