Squire Forester-His Instincts and Tendencies-Atmosphere of the Times favourable for their Development-Thackeray's Opinion-Style of Hunting-Dawn of the Golden Age of Fox-hunting, &c.

It will be seen that around Willey and Willey Hall, associations crowd which serve to make the place a household word and Squire Forester a man of

mark with modern sportsmen and future Nimrods, at any rate if we consent to regard the Squire's characteristics as outcrops of the instincts of an ancient stock. Descended from an ancestry so associated with forest sports and pursuits, he was like a moving plant which receives its nourishment from the air, and he lived chiefly through his senses. He was waylaid, as it were, on life's path by hereditary tendencies, and his career was chequered by indulgences which, read in the light of the present day, look different from what they then did, when at court and in the country there were many to keep him in countenance. At any rate, Squire Forester lived in what may be called the dawn of the golden age of fox-hunting. We say dawn, because although Lord Arundel kept a pack of hounds some time between 1690 and 1700, and Sir John Tyrwhitt and Charles Pelham, Esq., did so in 1713, yet as Lord Wilton, in his "Sports and Pursuits of the English" states, the first real pack of foxhounds was established in the West of England about 1730. It was a period when, for various reasons, a reaction in favour of the manly sports of England's earlier days had set in, one being the discovery that those distinguished for such sports were they who assisted most in winning on the

battle-fields of the Continent the victories which made the British arms so renowned. Then, as now, it was found that they led to the development of the physical frame-sometimes to the removal of absolute maladies, and supplied the raw material of manliness out of which heroes are made-a view which the Duke of Wellington in some measure confirmed by the remark that the best officers he had under him during the Peninsular War were those whom he discovered to be bold riders to hounds. Wilton, in his book just quoted, goes still further, by contending that "the greatness and glory of Great Britain are in no slight degree attributable to her national sports and pastimes."

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That such sports contributed to the jollity and rollicking fun which distinguished the time in which Squire Forester lived, there can be little doubt. In his " "Four Georges," Thackeray gives it as his opinion, that "the England of our ancestors was a merrier England than the island we inhabit," and that the people, high and low, amused themselves much more. "One hundred and twenty years very ago," he says, "every town had its fair, and every village its wake. The old poets have sung a hundred jolly ditties about great cudgel playings,

famous grinnings through horse-collars, great Maypole meetings, and morris-dances. The girls used to run races, clad in very light attire; and the kind gentry and good parsons thought no shame in looking on." He adds, "I have calculated the manner in which statesmen and persons of condition passed their time; and what with drinking and dining, and supping and cards, wonder how they managed to get through their business at all." That they did manage to work, and to get through a considerable amount of it, is quite clear; and probably they did so with all the more ease in consequence of the amusement which often came first, as in the case of "Naughty idle Bobby," as Clive was called when a boy; and not less so in that of Pitt, who did so much to develop that spirit of patriotism of which we boast. It was a remark of Addison, that "those who have searched most into human nature observe that nothing so much shows the nobleness of the soul as that its felicity consists in action;" and that "every man has such an active principle in him that he will find out something to employ himself upon in whatever place or state he is posted."

Those familiar with the Spectator will remember

that he represents himself to have become 80 enamoured of the chase, that in his letters from the country he says: "I intend to hunt twice a week during my stay with Sir Roger, and shall prescribe the moderate use of this exercise to all my country friends as the best kind of physic for mending a bad constitution and preserving a good one." He concludes with the following quotation from Dryden :

"The first physicians by debauch were made;
Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade:

By chase our long-liv'd fathers earned their food;
Toil strung their arms and purified their blood.”

But a country squire of Mr. Forester's day even more pithily and quaintly expresses himself as to the advantages to be derived from out-door sports:

"Those useful hours that our fathers employed on horseback in the fields," he says, "are lost to their posterity between a stinking pair of sheets. Balls and operas, assemblies and masquerades, so exhaust the spirits of the puny creatures over-night, that yawning and chocolate are the main labours and entertainments of the morning. The important affairs of barber, milliner, perfumer, and looking-glass, are their employ till the call to dinner, and the bottle or gaming table demand the tedious hours that inter

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