Market Harborough, and Inside the BarWhyte-Melville, G. J. (George John)
General
Market Harborough, and Inside the Bar
Whyte-Melville, G. J. (George John)
Country life -- England -- Fiction; English fiction -- 19th century; Fox hunting -- Fiction
Our friend’s admirers term his person square: his enemies, and he has a
few, call it “clumsy:” certainly his hands and feet are large, his limbs
robust, but not well-turned; and though it would make him very angry to
hear me, I confess his is not my _beau idéal_ of the figure for a
horseman. Nevertheless, he has an honest English face, round and rosy,
light-grey eyes, such as usually belong to an energetic and persevering
temperament, with thin sandy hair, and a good deal of stiff red whisker.
Altogether, he looks like a man you would rather drink with than fight
with, any day. Perhaps, if very fastidious, you might prefer letting him
alone, to doing either. Of his costume, I shall only say that it
partakes on everyday occasions of the _decidedly_ sporting, with a
slight tendency towards the _slang_. Its details are those of a dress in
which the owner is ready to get on horseback at a moment’s notice; nay,
in which he is qualified, without further preparation, to ride four
miles straight-on-end, over a stiff country; so enduring are its
materials, and so suggestive of equestrian exercise is its general fit.
Also, on Sundays, as on week-days, in town or country, he delights in a
“five to two” sort of hat, with a flat brim and backward set, which
denote indisputable knowledge of horseflesh, and a sagacity that almost
amounts to dishonesty.
Not that Mr. Sawyer ever bets; far from it. He elbows his way indeed
into the ring, and criticises the two-year-olds as they walk jauntily
down to the starting-post, as if he speculated like the Leviathan, and
owned a _string_ like Sir Joseph Hawley’s; but all this is simply _ex
officio_. Wherever horses are concerned, Mr. Sawyer deems it incumbent
on him to make a demonstration, and he goes to Tattersall’s as regularly
on the Sunday afternoons in the summer, as you and I do to dinner. Like
the Roman Emperor, the horse is his high-priest, and the object of his
idolatry.
I am afraid hunting is going downhill. I do not mean to say that there
is not an ever-increasing supply of ambitious gentlemen who order coats
from Poole, boots from Bartley, and horses from Mason, to display the
same wherever they think they are most likely to be admired; but I think
there are few specimens left of the old hunting sort, who devoted
themselves exclusively to their favourite pursuit, and could not even
bear to hear it mentioned with anything like levity or disrespect; men
whose only claim to social distinction was that they _hunted_, who
looked upon their red coat as a passport to all the society they cared
to have, and who divided the whole community, in their own minds, into
two classes—“men who hunt,” and “men who don’t.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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