he shooting
parties--the driving parties--the overturning parties--the flirting
parties--the fighting parties in that series are all and each of them
nearly divine. Positively you must buy a set of Alken's works--they are
splendid things--no drawing-room is complete without them." Alken, it
will be seen, had already made his mark, but it was his connection with
Mr. Apperley, _alias_ "Nimrod," that was to bring him his largest meed
of fame.

[Illustration: RACE HORSE]

CHARLES JAMES APPERLEY

Charles James Apperley was born at Plasgronow, Herefordshire, in 1778,
and educated at Rugby. His father, a man of literary tastes, who
corresponded with Dr. Johnson and read Greek before breakfast, had been
tutor and bear-leader on the grand tour to Sir William Watkin Wynn.
Young Apperley, who refused to be turned into a scholar, was gazetted
cornet in 1798 in Sir W. Wynn's regiment of yeomanry, and served in
Ireland during the Rebellion. On his return to England in 1801, he
married a Miss Wynn, a cousin of Sir William's, and settled at Hinckley
Hall in Leicestershire, where he hoped to add to his income by selling
the hunters that he trained. Three years later he moved to Bilton Hall,
near Rugby, once the property of Joseph Addison, where he hunted
regularly with the Quorn and the Pytchley, till another move took him to
Bitterly Court, in Shropshire, where he became intimate with that
amazing character John Mytton, of Halston House, whose life and death he
was afterwards to record in a book that made both subject and biographer
famous. Here we may suppose that Apperley was witness of some of those
escapades that are now familiar to every student of sporting literature:
the midnight drive across country, when a sunk fence, a deep drain, and
two quickset hedges were successfully negotiated; the attempt to leap a
turnpike gate with a tandem, when leader and wheeler parted company; and
the gallop over a rabbit warren to see whether the horse would fall,
which it very naturally did, and rolled upon its rider. It was perhaps
just as well for Apperley that he left this too exciting neighbourhood
after a few years, and moved to Beaurepaire House, in Hampshire. The
loss of money in farming operations brought him into difficulties, and
at this time he seems to have conceived the idea of writing a book on
hunting. He produced nothing, however, till some years later, when he
was persuaded by Pittman, editor of the _Sporting Magazine_, to