ver 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 th