among the foxes was a sad spoil sport. The huntsman (Smith) is a capital horseman, with a very fine voice. He complained of the interruption of the railroad fences; in a few years he will think as little of it as they do in Durham, Gloucestershire, and Cheshire. He does his work very quietly, and the pack being very silent, it requires a sharp eye or they steal away from cover before you are aware, and with a good scent it takes a wonderful horse to catch them if they get a few fields ahead. I never saw hounds work so well with a bad scent, but I have an old fashioned prejudice in favour of a little music on breaking cover. At Brocklesby they told me that they draft more for tongue than any other foible."

All very good this, even to the objection, which we join in with, and recommend at once to his lordship's attention. Perhaps, though, the home breed of Yeomen ride a little jealous, and want their hounds to be like the Baron's mute bitches over the Aylesbury Vale, where there is no hope if you are once beat out of sight. "The Brocklesby," we may mention as our friend does not, are considered the oldest or longest established pack of foxhounds in the kingdom.

The crowning piece of proof, however, as to Lord Yarborough's character as a sportsman and landlord, is given in the following few lines. Sam Slick says, if you want to see how rich the English are, go into Hyde Park on a summer evening; but Sam had never met "the Brocklesby" at Linwood Warren, or he must have made an addendum to his recommendation

"The hunting field was a sort of thermometer of the wealth of the Brocklesby district, every farm turned out one or more horsemen chiefly in scarlet, well mounted, well appointed, so that when all assembled there was probably represented £30,000 or £40,000 a year of farmers' rent. They came dropping in upon us from gates and over hedges on all sides; every field in the horizon had a dot of scarlet."

We challenge all England, and we may as well say the world at once, to beat-how few even could hold up a hand to equal-such a scene as this. Picture the hearty, jolly gentlemanly fellows coming up, not in the hang-dog way farmers creep to, and are received in some quarters we could name, but knowing their lord was proud to see them out, and feeling, themselves, they were not out of place. No wonder such men as these made even the seldom-surprised press-men stare a bit. And then the scarlet coats, too, we should like to know what two play-atpropriety gentlemen who wrote themselves dry in the "Sporting Magazine" some twenty years ago, on farmers not riding in scarlet, would

say now.

With a kindness we fear we shall never be able sufficiently to requite, our tourist takes one of these from the "delightful scene,' as Somerville calls it, and portrays him on his own hearth-still taking care to make the happy influence of "my lord" so colour the whole sketch, that we readily adopt it entire, though running to a greater length than any we have yet given :

"Our first halt was to breakfast with the gentleman who was to take me off my guide's hands and up to the cover-side, my first guide being on other thoughts intent than hunting. Our breakfast host met us at the door, and he, his dwelling, his farm buildings, and his farm, were all fair specimens of what is to be found on the Wolds. He was a tall, portly, powerful man, nearly six feet in height, and about fifteen stone

There was

in weight, with rosy, well cut, small features, a bald forehead, curly
grizzly hair, with a big arm and a small hand, and gay jovial expression
of countenance, welcoming the stranger as if he had known him and
liked him before. The house, a brick villa, with a garden of a couple
of acres well stocked with fruit trees, overlooking huge, bare ploughed
fields; just the style of house that near a large town would let for
£100 a year.
Divided from the house by an occupation road were the
farm buildings, a compact three-sided parallelogram. I counted forty
young beasts in one yard; there may have been more.
first-rate stabling for about half a dozen horses. My new friend was
one of the crack horsemen, and horse-sellers too, in the district. That
was to be seen in the accustomed style of his boots, white cords, scarlet
waistcoat and coat, with the button of the Brocklesby hunt. In the
breakfast room the table displayed, with its array of hot and cold meats,
a picture not to be beaten by the Café de l'Europe before the Revolu-
tion. A gold-mounted whip on the chimney-piece, with an inscription
showing that it was presented by Lord Yarborough to the owner of the
best three-year-old hunting colt, and some sporting prints, gave a hint
of the prevailing tastes of the owner, just as the pictures of prize bulls,
sheep, and pigs, bred by my friend Torr, and hung round his room,
show his preference. In a word, host, hostess, house, furniture, every-
thing, was thoroughly English, and the reception worthy of that Eng-
lish hospitality which in towns has been too often replaced by second-
hand gentility. The farm is about 1,100 acres, nine-tenths arable,
and almost all reclaimed by the present owner from moorland, having
been let or given, as they term it, to him by the late Earl in a wild
state some thirty years ago, because he seemed a hard young fellow,
and it would give him something to do.'

6

"After breakfast, to which my preparatory gallop afforded an admirable sauce, we adjourned to the stable, where a horse, kindly lent by a gentleman whom I had not then had the pleasure of knowing (where else should I have found such kindness?), awaited me. As the letter in which Mr. N. announced his politeness spoke of my father's horse,' I expected, as a matter of course, some fat old screw. My surprise and pleasure were equal on seeing a fine well-bred mare, nearly sixteen hands high, with an eye that looked like going, and she did not disappoint me.

"Breeding, size, and power, distinguish the Lincolnshire hunters. They are chiefly bought at three and four years from Yorkshire and other breeders, and paired by those of the Wold farmers who have sporting tastes that is to say, almost all. The want of pasture prevents much breeding. If circumstances should lower the price of horse-keep concurrently with the opening of the Lincolnshire railways, the trade in horses must, in the presence of the limitless demand, take a great development. My host showed me, before starting, three hunters, for size, power, beauty, and breeding, not to be easily matched." Just to complete the picture of this true stamp of English gentleman, who,

"Though he feasted all the great,
Still ne'er forgot the small,"

we venture one word more from our entertaining traveller, on the condition of the labourer in the Wolds. "A better-looking, more con

་

tented race," he says, "I never saw: the villages are pleasant sights, so clean and comfortable, and" (he adds, with a delicious naïveté worthy of the illustrious Mr. Pepys himself) "the women are very pretty.' We don't know whether Mr. Gibbons has got our railway friend down for the first farm vacant, but we would take small odds a Lincolnshire lass answered our knock at Hollyhock Lodge, should we ever have the pleasure to call there.

After all, we feel that the disappointment we have mentioned in obtaining more definite particulars of Lord Yarborough's career is perhaps more an advantage than otherwise. From the letters we have availed ourselves of, we have been able to give a far truer picture of the man than we ever, perhaps, could have expected from any elaborate or wellset memoir. From the impartial statement of a gentleman who, it should be remembered, was not writing up to Brocklesby as his text, but jotting down just what he saw, we gather that Lord Yarborough is a good man in no negative sense of the term. No; but rather a nobleman with ability to distinguish himself in the senate, with energy and acuteness to at once establish his worth amongst men of business, and coupled with these the high feeling and liberality of an English country gentleman, and the bold heart and true spirit of an English sportsman. No wonder the "John Bright school" scowl at such a "coalition ;" but long distant be the day ere they break it up!

H. C.

SPORTING CLUBS.

BY THE EDITOR.

"illis

"Accedas socius."

HORAT. SAT. ii. 5.

Science having classified dead beetles, civilization proceeded to order and arrange living gentlemen. Thereupon the club was instituted-an establishment understood to be moulded on the principle of a social Cosmos. It is assumed to be a company of persons individual in taste and purpose-one and undivided in views and objects. London is the tropic of clubs. There they flourish, increase and multiply exceedingly. But there is no confusion in this infinite variety. Each is stamped and identified by its peculiar idiosyncracy. It is impossible, for instance, to mistake the "cut" of the Rag and Famish: and the Horizontal is proverbial for calico shirts, and- -so forth. The system on which these societies for the most part are organized is indeed a passport to popularity. Washington Irving, in his "Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus," speaking of the earliest settlement on the isthmus of Darien, says, among the various regulations made for the good of the infant colony, it was ordained that no lawyers should be admitted there." This wholesome precaution is kept in sight, with excellent effect, in the qualification required of such as seek admission into the leading metropolitan clubs. It is rumoured-but whether in consequence of this has not transpired-that the site of the Fleet prison has been purchased with a view to erecting upon it a club house of unusual dimensions—“ Hal! thou hast the most unsavoury similes."

The social unions of the capital, though they certainly are sufficiently miscellaneous, come, with but few exceptions, within the category of our thesis. Politics and play bind together the nobles of Westminster, while the citizens of London are linked by a propensity for intellectual intercourse and brandy-and-water at sixpence the glass. Perhaps this may be pronounced a cynical analysis, but it presents a prospect in coleur de rose compared with the condition of such societies in England's Augustan age. Club life, as painted by Horace Walpole, was a masque of emasculate coxcombry in St. James's: and in St. Paul's, as drawn by Dr. Samuel Johnson, a privilege for impertinence for which a modern coal-porter would get his head" punched." Night after night, for a quarter of a century, did that pass with impunity in Boswell-court which breathed at a meeting of the Galway Blazers would have set each particular member to eat the other in his boots. Lord Chesterfield's prescription for good manners was-"The Graces: the Graces, remember the Graces." I cannot but think Sir Lucius OTrigger's "Would ye choose to be pickled and sent home?" quite as practical a recipe for preserving a gentle behaviour among men..... But peace to the "Reform," and long life to the Conservative, to Brookes's, Boodle's, White's, and Arthur's-to the Athenæum, and eke the Erectheumand may "the Carlton "live for ever! With this chorus of courtesy the business of the drama commences.

What would Squire Western have thought of the old club at Melton, which Nimrod describes as going to its repose at ten P.M. upon tea and toast and a rubber of whist? The rector of the parish in which I was born and bred drank his two bottles of port as regularly as the dinner cloth was drawn, and when there was toasted cheese for supper (which there was every night in the year) his two tumblers of rum punch "to make all snug and comfortable." Mrs. Sullen, in the Beaux Stratagem, intimates that it was the custom of a husband of that period to " tumble into bed, souse! like a dead salmon into a fishmonger's basket.' Ladies of the present day are said to be averse to clubs, from which their lords retire, mild as the moonbeams" after a glass of soda-water and a hand at lansquenet.

The sporting club is not a variety of the metropolitan company so called, but altogether an association sui generis, consisting of many classes. Each national sport has its club, or distinctive nucleus, which is the class association whence spring, as from a parent root, branches as different in character as constitution. The turf has its Jockey Club at Newmarket, which, I was going to say, is not a convivial society, but which may more properly be regarded in its public relation, at least, as a racing court of precedent and reference. How it may be with honourable members of that house, or of any other "House," when "Implentur veteris Bacchi pinguisque ferinæ "

it might not be becoming to inquire. It is a company of gentlemen promoting and supporting by means as honourable to themselves as beneficial to the object of their patronage, the most popular of their country's national sports. In declining the office of arbitrators in cases of disputed wagers they not only purged themselves of a most ungracious and unsuitable agency, but they offered let and hindrance to a practice which has wrought great offence to the pastime they are associated to encourage. At the Rooms in Newmarket the Racing Club has in every way a fitting "local habitation," an appliance not elsewhere accorded, albeit

every district in the kingdom furnishes a "name." Everywhere throughout the land we find racing and hunting clubs, and clubs for every species of sport, from the aristocratic cricket of Lord's, to the "knock-em-downs" of Simmery Ax-but clubs, "nomine tantum.” Yachting alone has adopted the London fashion of "mounting" a club: yachting, in the spirit of true English philosophy, makes provision for "the belly and its members :" yachting at Cowes and Ryde, at Plymouth and Southampton, in the Mersey and the Liffey

"Where'er winds breathe, or waters roll,"

is seen on hospitable thoughts intent." It is to our amateur marine that we must go for the beau ideal of a sporting club.

This is a riddle which the more you read the farther you are from the solution. If a man is pointed out as a member of Lord's, you know that he is a cricket player; it is certain that a "Leander rows; that members of the Ashdown Park course; that habitués of the Red-house shoot; but it is by no means a sequitur that a member of a Royal Yacht Club yachts-that he ever sailed on salt water, that he ever saw salt water, that the mere mention of the sea don't affect him like the hydrophobia. The sport of sailing is one peculiar, it is generally supposed, to summer time, but the recognized yachting season does not commence till autumn. It is mauvais ton to be afloat in the Solent before August. It is now, at this present writing, the middle of June, and Cowes has as little the air of a metropolis of yachting as Herne Bay. The Royal Victoria Club House at Ryde is such a sea-side pavilion as you won't meet with from Spithead to the Bosphorus-but there is nobody in it. You may breakfast, dine, and sup there, if you are a member, or happen to know some one who is that will write your name in the visitor's book, in as profound and solemn state as the Emperor of China makes his meals. Nothing can be more perfect than the fashion in which you are lodged and catered for. There are books and billiards, a battery to smoke on, and an ancient mariner in attendance, that will tell you all about "Nelson, Howe, and Jervis," if you only condescend to ask him which way the wind blows. There's a library and a news-room, cosy as comfort, all the live-long winter, and fresh and fragrant when London is less tolerable than a chandler's laboratory. And all this, by the grace of two decent sponsors, you may secure for the sum of £3 3s. per annum. Should you ask " Quis deus hæc otia fecit?" the answer is, Four hundred philanthropists, whose pride is the sea service.

Should your taste lean towards the contemplation of character, a Yacht Club is your museum. If it contain one who asserts" honour bright, that he delights in sailing for sailing's sake, you have fallen in with that very rare variety of the species' an amphibious gentleman. You know what Jack suggests for those who "go to sea for pleasure." There's many a jolly young waterman that, were he compelled to make a selection, would be sorely puzzled between the two alternatives. It requires a fair experience of the shifts that amateur navigators resort to, as cxcuses for "laying up," to lead to a tolerable opinion being formed upon this point. When you see a man expending his money and his time on anything, there is reason to conclude he is in earnest about it. You learn that he has a clipper on the stocks at Wanhill's or Ratsey's, which looks like yachting. His cutter, a twenty-five ton craft of the new school, is launched, with a sensation. She has scarcely formed