A Hunting Favourite
The Chace, The Road and The Turf. By Nimrod. A new edition with an Introduction by W. Shaw Sparrow, and nineteen illustrations in colour, half-tone and line. (The Bodley Head. 16s.)
THE Ingratitude of Apperley is sordid reading, even when handled with the self-restraint of Mr. Shaw Sparrow. It would -seem unnecessary to -delineate With however light a hand the obscure and bitter controversies of a journalist whose sporting writings are admittedly second to none in authority, and in fascination only to the character sketches of Surtees.
Would you join the cavalry charge from Ashby pastures ? Would you view the acres that lie between those two steadily cocked ears ? Would you experience the very deluge of the VVhissendine after three nights' rain ? Would you participate in the last, frantic (yet, if he knows it, highly scientific) resorts of the true hero of every foxhunt ? If you read The Chace, you will feel yourself in the" first flight" even though your mount be a high-backed chair and your prospect a forest of chimneys and telegraph poles. Is it because Nimrod himself has forgotten for a few hours of paradise, the bitterness of exile and the smoky residences of Calais ?
The long paper on The Road, though necessarily more technical, is yet of interest in depicting one large, and often forgotten, aspect of the lives of our great-grandfathers. Yet those tedious journeys had their compensations. The countryside, less accessible, was consequently less marred by the hideosities that rise to-day in their legions along our main roads, sprouting like mushrooms in a night, with their attendant petrol pumps and advertisements for patent medicines. This very day over Nimrod's own hunting country—Sir Watkin Wynn's—the hideous new water-power electric wires are extending to the distant towns of Staffordshire. Can we imagine his horror if, like the "worthy old gentleman of . . . 1742," he were once more to revisit the scenes of his youth and to journey along the Holyhead Road, not on the " Highflyer," but in a motor car ? Quite sincerely, there are few more pleasant experiences, if the night be warm, than to ride up the Mall a deux in a
hansom cab. There are still two or three frequenting theatre. land.
Nimrod approaches The Turf by a much more outspoken road than any journalist would dare to tread to-day. Many of the perpetrators of racing crimes, he hails by name. Awful is the warning he draws up for the uninitiated youth. "The chace does not usually bring any man into bad company; the modern Turf is fast becoming the very manor of the worst." Nimrod himself thinks that, like Tacit-us of Rome, he is chronicling rather the decline of the Turf, than like Livy, the splendours of its great age. Examples of fraud, forgery, and falsehood abound. Yet in his outcry for clean sport he speaks from the heart. "Let it not be forgotten, that, had we no racing, we should not be in possession of the noblest animal in the creation—the thoroughbred horse." Since his day, the Augean Stables have, at least partially, been cleansed. Yet still there is dirt to be swept away. Nimrod's outcry in 1742 is the outcry of men like Mr. Geoffrey Gilbey to-day.
Nimrod was a scholar, familiar with his classics, and quoting extensively from them ; an historian ; and a delver into old documents. It was characteristic that he should chronicle of a Melton dinner : "The subject of foxhunting was named but once in the evening . . . to enquire after a gentleman who had had a severe fall over some timber ; and to ask, by the way, if Dick Christian came alive out of a ditch." He was a moralist but no hypocrite. He was proud of writing for the Quarterly Review. He was high-handed in his dealings with Pittman—but for this he paid bitter penance. It is the more difficult to forgive Mr. Shaw Sparrow for raking up the old sordid details. Apart from this blemish, this volume is by far the best reprint of Nimrod's Quarterly essays that we have yet seen. The nineteen illustrations are beautifully repro- duced and cover a much wider range than usual. The book at its price is not expensive and with November only a few days distant, and the sound of the horn echoing over the rolling pastures of Leicestershire, it is safe enough to predict that the adventures of" Snob" will not lose anything of their former popularity.
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