"Fox-hunting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the young gentlemen whom he had always pictured as highly delighted by the Grand Tour are in reality very homesick for England. They are weary of the interminable drives and interminable conversazioni of Italy and long for the fox-hunting of Great Britain.[406] Fielding's account of his voyage to Lisbon contains too much about his wife's toothache and his own dropsy.[407] Smollett, like Fielding, was a sick man at the time of his travels, and we can excuse his rage ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... "sharp going while it lasts, and a little knack wanted to stick them scientifically. Some say it's more exciting than fox-hunting, but that's childish; I never heard a man assert it whose liver was not on the wane. It's more dangerous, certainly. A header into the Smite or the Whissendine is nothing to a fall backward into a nullah, with a beaten horse on the ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... etiquette that encouraged good-fellowship in their itinerant societies. At an early date they are found varying the monotony of cross-country rides with racing-matches and drinking bouts, cock-fights and fox-hunting; and enlivening assize towns and country houses with balls and plays, frolic and song. A prodigious amount of feasting was perpetrated on an ordinary circuit-round of the seventeenth century; and at circuit-messes, judges' dinners, and sheriffs' banquets, saucy ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... me to know whether I was going fox-hunting; and one of the dock-police, stationed at the gates, after peeping out upon me from his sentry box, a snug little den, furnished with benches and newspapers, and hung round with storm jackets and oiled capes, issued forth in a great hurry, crossed my path as I was emerging into ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... has money enough," said Howard, solemnly. "But no matter. It is a waste of time to discuss philosophy with a man who has no mind above fox-hunting, fishing, pheasant-shooting, and dancing. By the way, how many times do you intend to dance with ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... his while to waste his time on such things and perhaps catch his death to boot. The Lord knew that was mere pretence. Eighty crowns for a beautiful, dark brown fox skin was a tidy sum! But a man had to think up something to say for himself, the way they all harped on fox-hunting: Bjarni of Fell caught a white vixen night before last, or Einar of Brekka caught a brown dog-fox yesterday. Or if a man stepped over to a neighbour's for a moment: Any hunting? Anyone shot a fox? Our Gisli here caught a grayish brown one ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... Hints on Training for the Turf, the Chase, and the Road; with Observations on Racing and Hunting, Wasting, Race-Riding, and Handicapping: Addressed to all who are concerned in Racing, Steeple-Chasing, and Fox-Hunting. Fcp. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... of the Legion were now sounding their derisive, fox-hunting calls, and behind us we could hear the far laughter and shouting: "Yoicks! Forrard! ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Undern cared as little for the graciousness of life as he did for its pitiful rhapsodies, its purple-mantled tragedies. He had no time for such trivialities. Fox-hunting, horse-breeding, and kennel lore were his vocation. He rode straight, lived hard, exercised such creative faculties as he had on his work, and found it very good. Three times a year he stated in the Undern pew ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... her run! Let her run! Give her a fair start, and do you give chase! It will be the rarest sport! Fox-hunting is a good thing, but girl-chasing must be the very h—l of sport, when I tell you—mind, I tell you, men—she shall be the exclusive prize of him who catches her!" ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Campbell and Cameron, Fox-hunting gentlemen, Follow the Jacobite back to his den! Run with the runaway rogue to his runway, Stole-away! Stole-away! Gallop to Galway, Back to Broadalbin and double to Perth; Ride! for the rebel is ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... were caused by the widow's easy admission of the gun being her son's property, and her manner of identifying it by the ornaments. He liked an attempt to baffle him; he was accustomed to it; it gave some exercise to his wits and his shrewdness. There would be no fun in fox-hunting, if Reynard yielded himself up without any effort to escape. Then, again, his mother's milk was yet in him, policeman, officer of the Detective Service though he was; and he felt sorry for the old woman, whose "softness" had ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... their flocks; having the dens and thickets driven, and stationing themselves on the outskirts with their long roers to shoot down the vermin as they issue forth. Such meetings are jovial, and the sport is exciting, but not to be compared, I think, to deer-stalking or fox-hunting, to say nothing of a foray ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... at Helmsby, in Yorkshire, and the immediate cause was an ague and fever, owing to having sat down on the wet grass after fox-hunting. Pope has given the following forcible, but inaccurate account of his last hours, and the place ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... descriptions of the brands and ear marks. The people were already beginning to pay attention to the breeding of their horses, and fine stallions with pedigrees were advertised, though some of the advertisements show a certain indifference to purity of strain; one stallion being quoted as of "mixed fox-hunting and dray" breed. Rather curiously the Chickasaw horses were continually mentioned as of special merit, together with those of imported stock. Attention was paid both to ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... in the highest strain of encomium. This was an incense the more pleasing, as I seldom or never had met with it before; for the young gentlemen who visited Sir George were for the most part of that athletic order, the pleasure of whose lives is derived from fox-hunting: these are seldom solicitous to please the women at all; or if they were, would never think of applying their flattery ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... guest. Arrested for a time at Malta by an attack of fever, he joined our army before hostilities began, rode with Lord Raglan's staff at the Alma fight, likening the novel sensation to the excitement of fox-hunting; and accompanied the chief in his visit of tenderness to the wounded when the fight was over. Throughout the campaign the two were much together, as we shall notice more fully later on. There are often slight but unmistakable signs of Kinglake's presence as spectator and auditor of ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... death of fox-hunting, pleasant shooting, and country neighbors; all the means of excitement around him exhausted, L'Isle lounged in the library at C——d Hall, with half a dozen open but discarded volumes before him, revolving in his mind all possible means of ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... death of George II. in 1760, the Lords were Whiggish, and the majority of English nobles held Whig principles. They were, on the whole, men of better education than the average member of the House of Commons, who was in most cases a fox-hunting squire, of the Squire Western type. The House of Lords stood in the way of the Commons when, in the Tory reaction of 1701, the Commons proposed to impeach Somers, the Whig Chancellor, a high-minded and skilful lawyer, "courteous and complaisant, humane and benevolent," for his share ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... Black Mountain, and Orson's eldest son, going to Murder Hollow with wood for the new barn floor that the widow Amidon is laying down, told Buck that he might as well come round to talk to his father about the pig. But old man Butler meant fox-hunting from the first, and what he wanted to do was to borrow Buck's dog, who had been duly brought over with the calf, and left on the mountain. No old man Butler did not go hunting alone, but waited till Buck came back from town. Buck ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... sportsmen, than the practice of hunting bag-foxes. It encourages a set of rascals to steal from other hunts; therefore keep in mind, that if there were no receivers there would be no thieves. What chiefly contributes to make fox-hunting so very far superior to other sports is the wildness of the animal you hunt, and the difficulty in catching him. It is rather extraordinary, but nevertheless a well-known fact, that a pack of hounds, which are in sport and blood, will not eat a bag-fox. I remember ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... A. Blunt, a farmer, much of whose time was devoted to card playing, rum-drinking and fox-hunting, so Charles stated. Charles gave him the credit of being as mild a specimen of a slaveholder as that region of country could claim when in a sober mood, but when drunk every thing went wrong with ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... through Lancelot's heart. There were the everlasting hills around, even as they had grown and grown for countless ages, beneath the still depths of the primeval chalk ocean, in the milky youth of this great English land. And here was he, the insect of a day, fox-hunting upon THEM! He felt ashamed, and more ashamed when the inner voice whispered—'Fox- hunting is not the shame—thou art the shame. If thou art the insect of a day, it is thy sin that thou ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... efficient or artistic. But the characters were so well handled, that the work from the first to the last was popular,—and was received as it went on with still increasing favour by both editor and proprietor of the magazine. The story was thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting, some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy. There was much Church, but more love-making. And it was downright honest love,—in which there was no pretence on the part of the ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... and china from the bankrupt stock of kings. According to their intellectualities their talk is of labor and capital, of working-girls' clubs and model tenement-houses, of Buddha and Zola, of foreign titles, and transplanted fox-hunting. To-day a hundred thousand dollars is barely a competency, and a building less than a dozen stories high dwarfs the highway of trade. The vestibule limited, the ocean grey-hound, the Atlantic cable, and the voice-bearing telephone have made all nations kin, and bid fair to ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... passing before his eyes, while the present faded away upon the growing quiet of the London evening and became remote as the distant roar of the traffic, which itself was remote as the sound of the sea in a shell. Fox-hunting squires caracoled by with the air of paladins; and there was never a lady mentioned that did not take the fancy like a ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... grandfather's, a mile or two away. He used to drive us down, and he would sit out there on the point and fish,—a grand old figure, in his broad hat, with his fishing creel over his shoulder. There were just two sports that my grandfather loved, fishing and fox-hunting; but he was a very busy doctor and couldn't ride often to hounds. But he kept a lot of them. He would have had a great contempt for Toby. His own dogs were ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... that with so many streams and ponds scattered about the country within easy reach, the farmers do not care for fishing. A farmer engaged in fishing is a rarity indeed. They are eagerly fond of fox-hunting, coursing, and shooting, but fishing is a dead letter. A party will sometimes go out and net a pond, but as for fishing proper, with rod and line, it is almost unknown. Every chance of shooting is eagerly snatched at. In May the young rooks are shot, after which the gun is put aside for a while. ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... struggling, noses down and tails up. In a few minutes nothing was left of the poor beast but bones, and not many of them. Violet had les honneurs du pied (the hoof of one of the hind legs of the stag), which is equivalent to the "brush" one gives in fox-hunting. She thanked M. M., the master of hounds, very prettily and said she would have it arranged and hang it up in the hall of her English home, in remembrance of a lovely winter afternoon, and her first experience of what still remains of the old French venerie. ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... "by the cover-side. Well, when you do, tell him you refused your wife your company for fear of offending the religious views of a fox-hunting parson." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... offensive return. On the other hand, it did not seem to me that I had been doing enough fighting to justify my existence, and there was obviously fighting going on to the left. I remember that I kept thinking of the refrain of the fox-hunting song, "Here's to every friend who struggled to the end"; in the hunting field I had always acted on this theory, and, no matter how discouraging appearances might be, had never stopped trying to get in at the death until the hunt was actually over; and now that there ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the sixteenth century, indeed, Verstegan the antiquary clearly saw that the existence of badgers and foxes in England implied the former presence of a belt of land joining the British Islands to the Continent of Europe; for, as he acutely observed, nobody (before fox-hunting, at least) would ever have taken the trouble to bring them over. Still more does the presence in our islands of the red deer, and formerly of the wild white cattle, the wolf, the bear, and the wild boar, to say nothing of the beaver, the otter, the squirrel, and ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... that the author's "point of view is that of the natural historian making an unprejudiced examination." An unprejudiced man, I take it, is a man whose sentiments are the same as mine, and I happen to disagree with Mr. WILLOUGHBY as profoundly as possible on several of the themes he has chosen. On fox-hunting, for instance, which he considers a more decadent sport than bull-fighting; and on Ulster, which he attacks bitterly by comparison with the rest of Ireland, for cherishing antiquated political animosities and talking ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... from the tendency to sit on benches and applaud professional players must have been made up a thousand times over in the benefit to the national physique from the spreading of the game into wide classes which formerly regarded it, much as they might fox-hunting, as a pastime reserved ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... by a numerous family of his female grandchildren, who, though they perpetually quarrelled among themselves, never failed to join against me, as the common enemy of all. His heir, who was about the age of eighteen, minded nothing but fox-hunting, and indeed was qualified for nothing else, notwithstanding his grandfather's indulgence in entertaining a tutor for him at home; who at the same time performed the office of parish clerk. This young ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... contest, with leisure, and friends, and Nature, and truth,—and prepare treatises which would have been immortal, for he was equal to anything he attempted. But such was not to be. He was needed in the House of Commons, then composed chiefly of fox-hunting squires and younger sons of nobles (a body as ignorant as it was aristocratic),—the representatives not of the people but of the landed proprietors, intent on aggrandizing their families at the expense of the nation,—and of fortunate merchants, manufacturers, and capitalists, in love with monopolies. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... 'uns," remarked a short gentleman in a fox-hunting coat, examining Virginia through his eye-glass; "coxswain, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... day, duly signed and sealed, with the customary rider to it that I must renounce the Stuarts, and swear allegiance to King George. I am no hero of romance, but a plain Englishman, a prosaic lover of roast beef and old claret, of farming and of fox-hunting. Our cause was dead, and might as well be buried. Not to make long of the matter, I took the oath without scruple. To my pardon there was one other proviso: that I must live on my estate until further notice. If at any time I were ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... wing, there grew up a connexion between Framley and Hogglestock, in which Mrs. Robarts also assisted. And now that Lady Lufton was looking about her, to see how she might best bring proper clerical influence to bear upon her own recreant fox-hunting parson, it occurred to her that she might use Mr. Crawley in the matter. Mr. Crawley would certainly be on her side as far as opinion went, and would have no fear as to expressing his opinion to his brother clergyman. So she sent for Mr. Crawley. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... in which he lived. Never, since the Reformation, was the state of religion so cold in England. The Established Church had triumphed over all her enemies. Puritanism had ceased to become offensive, and had even become respectable. The age of fox-hunting parsons had commenced, and the clergy were the dependants of great families, easy in their manners, and fond of the pleasures of the table. They were not expected to be very great scholars, or very grave companions. If they read the service with propriety, did not ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... The ordinarily clean-scrubbed floor was covered with sheet iron. A chairman was appointed; and one gentleman was requested to read the obnoxious article. This over, a well-fed, prosperous-looking, fox-hunting iron merchant from Great Charles Street rose, and in very shaky grammar moved, that The Times had disgraced itself and insulted Birmingham, and that it was the duty of every Birmingham man to stop its circulation in the town. This having been seconded, and duly carried, ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... you to be more of a sportsman, you know. Sporting instinct. What? Every Englishman should have it!" This all very good-humouredly, and I answer, laughing: "Aha, sir. You see I know better." Which merely stirs some jovial spirit to stand up and propose: "Gentlemen, fox-hunting!" You see? ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... Imagine that, Allie!" his hearers would cry. Then they would ask him about the fox-hunting in Bucks, and tease him for further particulars about his sister Edith, who ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... resist the lure of things technical. If he writes of a horse he must write as though he had bred and sold horses all his life. If he writes of a steam-engine he must write as though he had spent his life among pistons and cylinders. He writes of ships and the sea, of fox-hunting, of the punishing of Pathans, of drilling by companies and of agriculture; and he writes as one from whom no craft could hide its mysteries. This fascination of mere craft, this delight in the technicalities and dialect of the ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... of the middling and upper classes, and the angry humility of the masses. The story is very slight, but sufficient for the effective presentation of the author's opinions. The best characters are an Irish parson, a fox-hunting squire and his commonplace worldly wife, and a thoughtless and reckless but not unkind man of the world. Here is a sketch of a commonplace old English vicar, such as has been familiar in the pages of novels and essays ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... jealousy and instinctive vigilance of the latter, an hour's stalk would put the lord of the hills at the mercy of Dick Stanmore. In all these sports he was a proficient, from all of them he derived a keen gratification, but fox-hunting was his passion and ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... he retorted. "He was clean bowled over. In that Irish fox-hunting song all the gallery will be shouting 'Tally-ho!' Where did ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... He delighted a whole generation of readers, and one reader at least in this generation he still delights; but I own that to enjoy him you must have mastered the art of skipping. Whether you take him in his earlier manner, in the "Charles O'Malley" vein of adventure, fox-hunting, steeple-chasing, Peninsular fighting, or in his later more intellectual studies of shady financiers, needy political adventurers, and the whole generation of usurers and blacklegs, he is always good; but alas and alas, he is never good enough. His ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... and stands out clear-cut from the rest. And pig-sticking is the sport of all sports which entail the killing of animals in which we could wish him to excel. Hear Major Moray Brown on the subject of fox versus pig: "You cannot compare the two sports together. To begin with, in fox-hunting you are dependent on 'scent.' Granted the excitement of a fast burst over a grass country, and that you are well carried by your horse, the end—what is it? A poor little fox worried by at least ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... a good, honest horse-race, and fox-hunting was a favorite sport with them. It is told of a Mr. Kirkton that he followed the hounds on horseback until he was eighty, and from that period to one hundred he regularly attended the unkennelling of the fox in his single ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... London; he was invariably accompanied by an equerry when he rode or drove. He wanted to be irreproachable and, if that involved friendlessness, it could not be helped. Besides, he had no very high opinion of the English. So far as he could see, they cared for nothing but fox-hunting and Sunday observances; they oscillated between an undue frivolity and an undue gloom; if you spoke to them of friendly joyousness they stared; and they did not understand either the Laws of Thought or the wit of a German University. Since it was clear ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... opportunity of freeing herself from certain oblique references to excellent matches. "If you are speaking on my behalf, I can assure you that no question can be more indifferent and impersonal to me than second marriage. It is no more to me than if you talked of women going fox-hunting: whether it is admirable in them or not, I shall not follow them. Pray let Mrs. Cadwallader amuse herself on that subject as much as on ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... two in Town where you may meet on certain evenings, everybody; where duchesses and unfledged poets, bishops and red republican refugees, fox-hunting noblemen and briefless barristers who have taken to politics, are jumbled together for a couple of hours, to make what they can out of each other, to the exceeding benefit of them all. For each and every one of them finds his neighbour a pleasanter person than he expected; and none ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... a clergyman a model of perfection, because he is a stout dashing fellow who plays at cricket and goes out fox-hunting; and, generally, who flies in the face of ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... the ancient fathers; in vain he took all the saints out for an airing; in vain he talked of the ritual coming to us from the Jews of old; in vain he asserted that Ritualism had brought life and vigour into a slumbering church; in vain he talked of the old fox-hunting clergy; in vain he talked of what a glorious thing for our church to give in a little, and Rome to give in less; of how union would be strength, and of the brave front we would show to all Christendom; of all we could do in stamping out infidelity and rationalism; in fact, he was sanguine ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... nature and that they practised head-hunting less from pleasure than from force of custom. But I am compelled to accept such an estimate of the Dyak character with reservations. From all that I could learn, head-hunting is a sport, like fox-hunting in England. Nor does it, as a rule, involve any great risk to the hunters, for the head-hunting raids are usually mere butcheries of defenceless people, the Dyaks either stalking their victim in the bush and killing him from behind, or attacking a village when the warriors are ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... later nor so famous, but he was strong and well and young, he had abundant friends, and his neighbors thought well enough of him to send him to the Burgesses and to make him a vestryman of old Pohick Church; if he felt the need of recreation he went fishing or fox-hunting or attended a horse race or played a game of cards with his friends, and he had few things to trouble him seriously. But fussy kings and ministers overseas were meddling with the liberties of subjects and were ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... listening to this hackneyed imposition of ministers about the balance of trade is astonishing. It shows how little they know of national affairs—and Mr. Grey may as well talk Greek to them, as to make motions about the state of the nation. They understand only fox-hunting ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... ground, which should supply all his simple wants; his wife should weave the clothes for the family; his children should learn nothing but the catechism and to speak the truth; he should take his religion without question from the hearty, fox-hunting parson, and live and die undisturbed by ideas. Now, it seems to me that if Mr. Ruskin could realize in some isolated nation this idea of a pastoral, simple existence, under a paternal government, he would have in time an ignorant, stupid, brutal community in a great deal worse case than the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... riding Black Fan, his fox-hunting mare. She was seventeen hands high, mostly legs, a natural pacer. She could jump over anything under the moon. Her hind legs the longer,—they seemed to be the propelling power and appeared to move faster than her front legs. When at top speed she traveled sort of sideways. This seemed a wise ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... festive board at night, when every one again lives through all the excitement of the day. Talk of fox-hunting after pig-sticking, it is like comparing a penny candle to a lighthouse, or a donkey ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy; and the "Evangelical" movement, which found representatives like Newton and Cecil within the pale of the Establishment, made the fox-hunting parson and the absentee rector at last impossible. In Walpole's day the English clergy were the idlest and the most lifeless in the world. In our own time no body of religious ministers surpasses them in piety, in philanthropic energy, or ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... a new species, sir," said the Doctor indignantly; "and if I do employ the hunters to collect for me, I see no inconsistency in that. But I consider this fly-fishing mania just of a piece with your IDIOTIC, I repeat it, IDIOTIC institution of fox-hunting. Why, if you laid baits poisoned with NUX VOMICA about the haunts of those animals, you would get rid of them in ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... despatched like bloodhounds, in all directions, to beat the bush; and the traps who had a more confined scent, creeped and crawled among the holes, and sneaked into the sly-grog tents round about, in search of the swarming unlicensed game. In a word, it was a regular hunt. Any one who in Old England went fox-hunting, can understand pretty well, the detestable sport we had then on the goldfields of Victoria. Did any trooper succeed in catching any of the 'vagabonds' in the bush, he would by the threat of his sword, confine ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... receive the communion or other sacrament at their hands."[502] This prejudice very slowly died out, but it did die out and the popular judgment favored and required clerical marriage. In the nineteenth century popular judgment rose in condemnation of fox-hunting parsons, and also of pluralists, and it has caused reforms and the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... very much thought of in these parts; he was the only one who dared oppose the House of Peers in Berlin in the question of war with Austria in 1866, and made such an astounding speech that he was obliged to retire from politics and take to fox-hunting. He gave the speech to me to read, and—I—well!—I didn't ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... out in Montgomery County; this later became their permanent residence. It had been built in 1762 by the Reverend Alexander Williamson, rector of Rock Creek Church (now St. Paul's), until he resigned in 1776, being a Tory. In history, he is called the "Sporting Parson" because of his love for fox-hunting and cock-fighting. ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... of fox hounds in America. Captain Trainer, master of the hounds, provided me with a spirited horse which had on a little sheepskin saddle of a kind on which I had never ridden. I was familiar neither with the horse, the saddle, the hounds, nor fox-hunting, and was extremely nervous. I would have backed out if I could, but I couldn't, so I mounted the horse and we ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... of the court-yard was a range of stables, now tenantless, but which bore traces of the fox-hunting squire; for there were stalls boxed up, into which the hunters might be turned loose when they came home ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... to come. Stolid Lum would have shown no surprise had she proposed that the two boys dive from a cliff, and if one survived he won; but the wonder and the succeeding joy in Pleasant's face disturbed Miss Holden. And when Pleasant swung his hat from his head and let out a fox-hunting yelp of pure ecstasy she rebuked him severely, whereat the man with the ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... Minstrel," where many and many a time Lady Fanny raced about on hunting days, watching the redcoats with childish eagerness—intensely interested in the joyousness and beauty of the sight, but in her heart always secretly thankful if the fox escaped. Fox-hunting on Minto Crags must indeed have been a picturesque sight, and there was a special rock overhanging a precipice upon which she loved to sit and watch the wild chase, men and horses appearing and disappearing with flashing rapidity among the woods and ravines ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... but by leaping on its back, booted and spurred. The two animals had misunderstood each other. The use of the crocodile has now been cleared up—it is to be ridden; and the use of man is, that he may improve the health of the crocodile by riding him a fox-hunting before breakfast. And it is pretty certain that any crocodile, who has been regularly hunted through the season, and is master of the weight he carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well as ever he would have done in the infancy of ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Amusement and pastime are nearly equivalent, the latter probably the lighter word; many slight things may be pastimes which we should hardly dignify by the name of amusements. Sports are almost wholly on the physical plane, tho involving a certain grade of mental action; fox-hunting, horse-racing, and baseball are sports. Certain sports may afford entertainment or recreation to certain persons, according to their individual tastes; but entertainment and recreation are capable of a meaning ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... what enthusiasm I once heard this superior creature commend the doctor for having accepted in lieu of a fee a set of Calvin's "Institutes," with copious notes, in twelve octavo volumes, and a portfolio of colored fox-hunting prints. My admiration for this model wife could find expression in no other way; I jumped from my chair, seized her in my arms, and imprinted upon her brow a fervent but ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... awkward youth whom she regarded as a boy. She had no intuition to divine the presence, or appreciate the worship, of one of the future master-minds of England, nor any ambition to ally herself with the wild race of Newstead, and preferred her hale, commonplace, fox-hunting squire. "She was the beau ideal," says Byron, in his first accurate prose account of the affair, written 1823, a few days before his departure for Greece, "of all that my youthful fancy could paint ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... amounts to a passion. All their money is reserved to buy new dresses for this occasion, silver rolls or gold linings for their hats, or new deerskin pantaloons and embroidered jackets with silver buttons. The accidents that happen are innumerable, but nothing damps their ardour. It beats fox-hunting. The most striking part of the scene is the extraordinary facility which these men show in throwing the laso. The bulls being all driven into an enclosure—one after another, and sometimes two or three at a time, were chosen from amongst them, and driven ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... mountains. "Even though our child should die for it," they said, "we will not ourselves deprive other creatures of their lives; but you, who live among the hills, are sure to hear when your neighbours go out fox-hunting. We don't care what price we might have to pay for a fox's liver; pray, buy one for us at any expense." So they pressed him to exert himself on their behalf; and he, having promised faithfully to execute the commission ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... instincts and spirit of courtesy and hospitality which marked his ancestors. He has the English preference for the life of the country to the life of the city; is more at home among green fields and rural scenes than in streets; loves horses and dogs, breeds of cattle, the sport of fox-hunting, wood-fires, Christmas festivities, the society of old neighbors, political discussions, traditions of this or that local celebrity, and to entertain everybody to the extent of, and even beyond, his limited means. Many of these proclivities have been ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... tenants, and attending with their fellow-landed neighbors the sessions of the General Assembly, and of the courts. Their pleasures were much the same as those of their kinsmen across the sea in merry England—fox-hunting, feasting and dancing; though to these amusements of the old country were added the more exciting deer chase, and the far more dangerous pastime of a bear hunt, when bruin's presence near the homestead became too evident ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... are rendered miserable by the disobedience and misconduct of their worthless children; and the Dobsons are making themselves wretched because they've no such creatures to trouble themselves about. The only man of property I can name in the whole country round who seems free from care, is our fox-hunting squire at Abbot's Beacon, who really does enter into the life of the sport, has plenty of money to carry it on with, and has besides one of the nicest places ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... old gray-heads and with boys of ten. They lost themselves in frenzies of delight. The 'cocking-main' is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no question about that; still, it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox-hunting—for the cocks like it; they experience, as well as confer enjoyment; which is not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the younger we like them!" was a favourite saying of an old fox-hunting squire I used to know. There are old men who seem to have lost but little of youth's vitality, and whom many a girl would be proud to marry. There are others—and it seems like an act of sacrilege to let any young life be linked ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... about hunting, in reference to sport in general. It was supposed of him, and supposed truly, that no young man in England was more devotedly attached to fox-hunting than he,—and that in want of a fox he would ride after a stag, and in want of a stag after a drag. If everything else failed he would go home across the country, any friend accompanying him, or else alone. Nevertheless, he entertained ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... which now, alas! was made impossible by his great weight. We who loved hard riding, hard fighting, and a strong will, admired him, and no man was more popular throughout the three counties than the fox-hunting parson. He knew the people and their ways, ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... THE COVENT GARDEN THEATRE contains proto-characters for his later plays. Sir Roger Ringwood, a "five-bottle man," who rode twenty miles from a "red-hot Fox Chace" to appear before Pasquin, is an early study for Macklin's later hard-drinking, fox-hunting Squire Groom in Love-a-la Mode or Lord Lumbercourt in The Man of the World. But Macklin's usual good ear for dialogue is missing from this play, nor is any character except his own as Pasquin followed long enough to make his characteristic speech identifiable. Since plot is absent ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... insipid imitation of the Palladian style, towards a restoration of the Gothic, which marked the close of the eighteenth century. This was the object he had set his heart on, with a singleness of determination which was regarded with not a little contempt by his fox-hunting neighbours, who wondered greatly that a man with some of the best blood in England in his veins, should be mean enough to economize in his cellar, and reduce his stud to two old coach-horses and a hack, for the sake of riding ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... days he rode sixty-five miles to Milledgeville, covering the distance in one day, and was fresh enough to attend a dance at night. He delighted in fox-hunting, although never a racer or in any sense a sporting man. During the earlier years of his career he practiced law in the saddle, as was the custom with the profession at that time, and never thought of riding to court on wheels until later in life. Throughout his ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... Fox-hunting there is none; but there are hunt clubs in the principal towns who run after a drag—in Melbourne after a kangaroo, and occasionally even after a deer. The country is of course monotonous, and wants very good riding. There are no sensational water-jumps even at steeplechase meetings, the colonial ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... regard fox-hunting merely as a relaxation, a source of pleasure, and the result of a desire to do the way people do in the novels which we steal from English authors: but this is not all. To successfully hunt a fox, to jump fences 'cross country like an ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... year, besides numbers that are hanged and killed. The realm," he adds, "was never in greater danger, or in like misery." But in the murderous work itself there was not much danger. "Our wars," writes Sir Henry Wallop, in the height of the struggle, "are but like fox-hunting." And when the English Government remonstrates against this system of massacre, the Lord-Deputy writes back that "he sorrows that pity for the wicked and evil should be enchanted ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... poachers of Varenne were invited to this family function. A splendid meal was prepared with many goose-pies and much local wine. Marcasse, whom I had made my manager at Roche-Mauprat, and who had a considerable knowledge of the art of fox-hunting, spent two whole days in stopping up the earths. A few young farmers in the neighbourhood, interested in the battue and able to give useful advice, graciously offered to join the party; and, last of all, Patience, in spite of his aversion ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... field near the track with two huntsmen at their heels. They were not chasing, but running leisurely, and with their flower-like, loose spread over the green, and the pink-coated hunters on their brown mounts, they afforded a picture as vivid and of as perfect semblance to all my visions of fox-hunting as I could have asked. I had been hoping that I might see something of the famous sport, almost as English as the Church or the Turf, and there, suddenly and all unexpectedly, the sight fully and satisfyingly was. Now, indeed, I felt that my impression of English society was ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... Fox-hunting. Badger-drawing. Duck hunting with dogs and sometimes duck and owl diving. Cock-fighting. Cock-throwing at Eastertide. Bull baiting and sometimes ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... exclaimed. 'It was quite a heroic adventure. You must know our fox-hunting here is rather a peculiar institution,—very good in its way, but strictly local. No horse could live among our hills, so we hunt on foot, and as the pace is good, and the work hard, nobody who starts with ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... to sleep. As I passed by the open door I heard a small excited voice expounding to a lymphatic dolly the whole mystery of fox-hunting:— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... sounded fitfully as the gale carried the sound away. The vixen is now at peace, though perhaps it would scarcely be safe to wander too near the close-shaven mead where the keeper is occupied more and more every day with his pheasant-hatching. And far down on the lonely outlying farms, where even in fox-hunting England the music of the hounds is hardly heard in three years (because no great coverts cause the run to take that way), foul murder is sometimes done on Reynard or his family. A hedge-cutter marks the sleeping-place ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... hear; so goes to die in youth in a foreign land. Thank God, I let Walter take his own way; and I trust he will be a useful, honoured soldier, being, for his time, high in the service; whereas at home he would probably have been a wine-bibbing, moorfowl-shooting, fox-hunting Fife squire—living at Lochore without either aim or end—and well if he were no worse. Dined at home with Lady S. and ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... table sat Lord Severn, a hale, hearty old gentleman of seventy. He was devoted to fox-hunting, and always ready to get up at five o'clock in the morning when a good run was in prospect. His wife sat opposite him. She was a beautiful old lady, her face clear-cut as a cameo. Her features were regular, and her bright black eyes ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... wood. Wheat-sowing. The Church. Village girls. The mad girl. The bird-boy's hut. Disappointments; reflections, &c. Euston-hall. Fox-hunting. Old Trouncer. Long ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... that after all you have said, Mr. North, I cannot understand the passion and the pleasure of fox-hunting. It seems to me both cruel ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... remains of every treasured note from Graham Vane; of the hoarded newspaper extracts that contained his name; of the dry treatise he had published, and which had made the lovely romance-writer first desire "to know something about politics." Ay, if the treatise had been upon fox-hunting, she would have desired "to know something about" that! Above all, yet distinguishable from the rest—as the sparks still upon stem and leaf here and there faintly glowed and twinkled—the withered flowers which recorded that happy ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not less spirited and much more able in thinking than his Examiner. The finical man of taste does indeed show himself to be sometimes weary of discussing constitutional questions; but he aims many enlivening thrusts at weak points of social life and manners; and the character of the Fox-hunting Squire, who is introduced as the representative of the Jacobites, is drawn with so much humour and force that we regret not being allowed to see more ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... composed of men too old to go in the army, and of young men who were not old enough, or who, from one cause and another, were exempted from military service. Ostensibly, its object was to encourage the noble sport of fox-hunting and to bind by closer ties the congenial souls whose love for horse and hound and horn bordered on enthusiasm. This, I say, was its [v]ostensible object, for it seems to me, looking back upon that terrible time, that the main purpose of the association was to devise new methods of forgetting the ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... ideas limited to fox-hunting and a study of Ruff's Guide, was no mate for a brilliant woman like Lola. Hence disagreements soon manifested themselves. A specially serious one would seem to have arisen at Barcelona, for, says a letter from a mutual acquaintance, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... father turned me out of doors, and settled my legal inheritance on my younger brother. I left Osbaldistone Hall on the back of a broken-down hunter, with ten guineas in my purse. I have never crossed the threshold again, and I never will. I know not, and I care not, if my fox-hunting brother is alive, or has broken his neck; but he has children, Frank, and one of them shall be my son if you cross me farther in ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... before falling into a feverish slumber on the first night after his accident, was to the effect that fox-hunting was splendid sport—magnificent sport,—but that it appeared to him there was no occasion whatever for a fox. And ever after that he was wont to boast that his first and last day of fox-hunting, which was an unusually ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... Israel, who was known at a distance by his furious driving. Had there been nothing worse in the Old Bachelor and Double Dealer, Congreve might pass for as pure a writer as Cowper himself, who, in poems revised by so austere a censor as John Newton, calls a fox-hunting squire Nimrod, and gives to a chaplain the disrespectful name of Smug. Congreve might with good effect have appealed to the public whether it might not be fairly presumed that, when such frivolous charges were made, there were ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... humorous occurrences has always seemed to me, Mr. Pescud, to be a particularly agreeable way of promoting and perpetuating amenities between friends. With your permission, I will relate to you a fox-hunting story with which I was personally connected, and which may ...
— Options • O. Henry
... have been chucked willy-nilly into the army. But the country had spinal disorders. It had locomotor ataxy. The result of sloth and self-indulgence. We had the Government we deserved ... I need not quote further. You can imagine a fine old fox-hunting Tory gentleman, with England filling all the spaces of his soul, blowing off the steam of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... But it is presumed that he is to be the hero of the hour, and that he is to be treated to his face, and spoken of behind his back, with love, admiration, and respect. But now this Master was told his presence would be allowed! And then this fox-hunting meeting was summoned for half-past twelve on a hunting-day;—when, as all the world knew, the hounds were to meet at eleven, twelve miles off! Was ever anything so base? said the Major to himself. But he resolved that he would be equal to the occasion. He immediately ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... of horses and mares to Philip (first) Earle of Pembroke. His Lordship had also Morocco horses, and for race horses, besides Peacock and Delavill, he had a great many more kept at the parke at Ramesbury and at Rowlinton. Then for his stagge-hunting, fox-hunting, brooke-hawking, and land-hawking, what number of horses were kept to bee fitt at all seasons for it, I leave the reader to guesse, besides his horses for at least halfe a dozen coaches. Mr. Chr. Wroughton guesses not lesse than an hundred horses. [In the notice of William, first Earl ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... second-rate wit, but not the less jealous on that account, showed the utmost deference to one whom, as a man of fashion, he must have regarded with contempt, and between whom and himself there were nearly "fifty good years of fair and foul weather." Cromwell, [Endnote: 8] a fox-hunting country gentleman, but uniting with that character the pretensions of a wit, and affecting also the reputation of a rake, cultivated his regard with zeal and conscious inferiority. Nay, which never in any other instance happened to the most fortunate poet, his very inaugural essays in verse ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... gorse had gone the rounds, they accepted him for a person willing to play their games. True, a faction suspended judgment for a while, because they shot, and hoped that Midmore would serve the glorious mammon of pheasant-raising rather than the unkempt god of fox-hunting. But after he had shown his choice, they did not ask by what intellectual process he had arrived at it. He hunted three, sometimes four, times a week, which necessitated not only one bay gelding (L94: 10s.), but a mannerly ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling |
