"CROSS COUNTRY."*
How veterans love "to fight their battles o'er again" we have learned from My Uncle Toby, Oliver Goldsmith, and others, and that the actors in the mimic war of field-sports find pleasure in lingering over the details of "runs "and " days " we all know by experience, if we have ever lived in a sporting district among sporting men, and are not entirely unsympathetic and intolerant of our neighbours' amusements. But the subject has a curious interest for the out- side world as well, and sporting books are very popular among readers who know nothing at all about sport, who never witnessed a " meet," to whom horses, except in the sober restraint of double or single harness, are unknown animals, and the language of the hunting-field is as unintelligible as the sea-talk of Feni- more Cooper and Captain Marryatt is to thousands of readers who delight in their novels,—all the same, perhaps all the more. Who has not read Major Whyte-Melville's hunting-chapters with pleasure, or has forgotten the impossible but exhilarating exploits of Charles Lever's heroes in the hunting-field ? " Ham- mersley's mare," who jumped the stone wall at the foot of the precipitous mountain, and the " chestnuts " who were harnessed at the bidding of Baby Blake, to the consternation of the shorn household at Gurt-na-morra, were historical characters to the readers of Lever, in the dead-and-gone days when the literature of animal spirits and pure romance held the public favour. Then came Mr. Lawrence and the "Guy Livingstone" school, the sickly flavour of affectation, of luxury, the " Berserk " -nonsense, and the poison of vice and intrigue crept into the tales of love, war, and sport, which hitherto had sometimes been bombastic, but had always been pure, and the hunting stories were spoiled. When Baby Blake and Kate Coventry were exchanged for the "Belie Dame sans merci," who figures under a dozen different names in Mr. Lawrence's novels, but is a vile and odious creature in them all, the hunting stories became merely vicious episodes, transferred from the ball-room and the drawing-room to the hunting-field. They had no more interest for readers who had no acquaintance with sporting affairs than that of the books as a whole. In their turn these were succeeded by Mr. Trollope's sporting stories, which are the very highest triumph of the common-place as yet achieved by its great master. A deed of conveyance would be about as interesting to the lay mind as the particulars of the fox-hunt, which is introduced in the opening chapters of the American Senator ; and of the individuality of animals, of rendering them interesting by char- acterisation, Mr. Trollope has not a notion. His horses are a "stable," his hounds are a "kennel," his huntsmen and keepers talk the driest professional jargon, and his " runs " are as topo- graphical, and nothing else, as if they were reports by a land- surveyor. If hunting-men read his hunting "bits," they must be surprised to find out what terribly dull dogs their fellows are ; • * Trtotata ; or, Cros.s-road Chronieles of Passages im Irish Hunting History, during the Beason 0/1875-76. By M. O'Connor Moths. London: Chapman and Hall.
the general reader who does not hunt, or know about hunting, probably skips them, or reads them for the humour which pro- perly belongs to the human as distinguished from the sporting- incident.
This great depression in a kind of literature which people undeniably though perhaps unaccountably like, renders the- thoroughly-entertaining, racy, animated, full-blooded, humorous book which Mr. O'Connor Morris calls Triviata doubly welcome.. He might have given it a more attractive name, and a more ap- propriate, but he could hardly have made it more amusing. It is not a novel, but it makes persons and places known to us as- only good novels make them known. It has the variety, the movement, and the vividness which a well-written book of travel ought to have, and also the friendly familiarity, the neat allusions, the pleasant continuity of a volume of descriptive letters. To many a reader this book will be like an old tune, or a well- remembered perfume, or a portrait come upon unexpectedly, of which all the features, long unseen, are familiar ; and it really is so capital a description of Ireland, apart from the horses and the hounds, from the riders and the runs, that it would be instructive to the surprisingly large number of English men and women to whom the sister-island is still a foreign country. Of course there is nothing like winter, in Mr._ O'Connor Morris's eyes ; for his purposes, spring is unwelcome, summer is useless, autumn is lingering, and "a southerly wind and a cloudy sky" are the only propitious combination ; but for all that, he has an appreciation of the picturesque, and under.. stands the points of a landscape as well as the points of a horse: So that to go "'cross country" with him is a pleasant exercise, —and one falls in with such charming people on the way. His sketch of the life of an ideal "M. F. H." is amusingly supple- mented with anecdotes of the reality. His "M. F. H." is to be unassailed by "that impecuniosity which vexes public men," and we are to imagine that hie farmers are "loyal and true, zealous in the cause of sport, and not too critical about the injuries done to seeds and young wheat ;" that he has able "heads of depart- ments," and is well helped on all sides. With all this, his duties are onerous, although if an "M. F. H." goes about them with all the heart and " go " which Mr. O'Connor Morris puts into his de- scription of them, he ought to be a Titan in strength, health., and joviality, and the most popular man "in the place."
To enjoy Mr. O'Connor Morris's book thoroughly, the reader ought to contemplate Ireland simply and solely as a hunting country, foxes as made to be hunted, and men, horses, and hounds as made to hunt them. Even if one were not in perfect sympathy with the book, it is too cleverly written to bore one ; but if one is, its breezy, fresh, cheery vivacity carries one along with it as easily as one of the famous goers in the Stradbally Hall stables, which form the first batch of equine acquaintances to which the author introduces his readers, when he takes them to the happy hunt- ing grounds of the Queen's County. With what pleasant skill he draws a series of pictures for them of the face of the country, the aspect of the meets, the personnel of the hunts, the performance of the horses and their riders, with many a characteristic touch which several readers will recognise and all may appreciate ; and even the poor foxes are made, considering their fate, painfully interesting. Mr. Morris is very impartial, but we think he has a weakness for the old " Kildares "and for Castletovrn, whose glory has departed with "Tom Conolly ; " but the Meath, the Louth, the Ward Union, the Kilkenny, and all the private packs find ample chronicling at his hands. The book is not one from which to make extracts—they would come like a "baulk" in a full field, not fair to the general going—but it is one to be read with pleasure from cover to cover, by those who ride, and those who don't.
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