LETTERS FROM MY UNCLE SCRIBBLE.

MY DEAR NEPHEW,

I must return to the subject of my former letter. Surely young gentlemen, met together for purposes of sport, should be above a suspicion of dishonesty. I know from experience that gentlemen—that is, gentlemen by position and birth-think all fair where horseflesh is concerned; but Oxbridge men ought to have a higher standard of honesty. Besides, your age should at least be a guarantee for straightforward dealing. You have not yet acquired that polish, by rubbing against the knaves of society, which knocks off, or smooths down the roughnesses of liberality, generosity, and candour. You have not had time to be done yourselves, so you have no claim for consideration in doing others. Besides this, there are reasons of policy which ought to prevent any approach to the legitimate looseness of turf principles in a place like Oxbridge. You have the character of a sportsman in your own hands. If the authorities—those refrigerators of hot blood-find gambling and rascality to be the invariable accompaniments of horseflesh, what do you suppose will become of the legitimate occupations of the sportsman ? Nature makes every man, with the proper use of his limbs, a lover of the chase, more or less; but it is art, and a very bad and degraded principle of art, which makes him a Leg. Upon my word, after what I have seen of the rising generation, I am not surprised at the fears of tender mothers or hard-hearted fathers, when they find their scarcelyfledged offspring in possession of any thing faster than a Suffolk Punch. First comes a gentlemanly boy, with an ordinary idea of public school honour: it forbids him to do a shabby trick, even by a schoolmaster, or to leave an old apple-woman with an unpaid chalk. In a month or two he has, what his friends call, a hack; but which, in his hands, is made to jump a hurdle, and becomes a hunter. The hunter proves to be fastish, and leathers and purple and white stripes are very becoming. A steeple-chase for the pewter is a not unfrequent consequence. I think this would be better left alone: but in another summer a soupçon of whisker, a visit to the metropolis, a lucky hit with a thorough-bred screw, and the remarkably interesting conversation of a fast man at the Corner, who can barely spell his own name, though it is of one syllable-sees the young gentleman in the pig-skin at something over nine stone. Then come by slow but certain steps all the worst features of the ring. Betting-list houses; paid touts who know nothing; and stable-boys of bad character, who know just so much as to make them more fatal than the touts. Scratchings of horses at wrong times; commission betting; shifts, stratagems, blackguardism: until the great sin of being detected gets our juvenile hero a horsewhipping from some aristocratic bully who, four years ago, was not fit to clean the boy's boots for honesty, and is now at least 50 per cent. worse than himself. Now this is not a very uncommon career with a young gentleman who begins nibbling at nobbling in his Oxbridge career and if men who have been passively done, will actively do,

certainly Oxbridge is not the place for the practice. If hunting fosters such practices as these in our Universities, I do not wonder at Athenian bellows-blowers trying to put a stop to it. What sympathy can they have with it? If these are the fruits of the tree, I wouldn't leave the roots in the ground.

"Audi alteram partem."

I do not believe that hunting has anything to do with the vice. I believe it would be a very salutary remedy. When I was at Oxbridge (never mind how long ago-it doesn't require the memory of the oldest inhabitant), for every horse which goes out of that city now, winter or summer, there then went forty. There were as many scarlet coats and pairs of leather breeches as there are now dirty shirts and straight-cut collars; and I think a more honourable, straightforward set of fellows than the Oxbridge undergraduates were not to be met with. I am no indiscriminate "Laudator temporis acti," but I contend that the very immunity from those ridiculous penalties for driving a phaeton, or going a" buster" (you youngsters are too fond of slang) for five-and-twenty minutes from White Cross Green, gave a good healthy tone, not only to the complexion, but to the heart. Do you think at twenty I'd have robbed the fellow I pulled out of Waterperry Brook; or substituted some thoroughbred impostor under a false name, or false conditions, for what was entered as my bona fide property-only to do my old schoolfellow, who knocked me out of a bullfinch a month before, in a clipping burst from Middleton Park?

The dons, or the commission, or whoever has had any hand in it, has done a very gross piece of folly, in putting a stop to legitimate sport in Oxbridge and Camford. Under proper regulations and conditions, it always was winked at, and kind advice given, and parental authority called in where a young gentleman had fallen too much in love with the sylvan goddess, and wanted to marry her outright, without anything to support her. I think they would have found their account in going on with this system. Young gentlemen are considered responsible for their own actions in other professions at your time of life: I don't see why you and your companions should be bigger fools than the rest of the world. If these places are schools, or convents, or only seminaries for the most serious calling of life, make them so-I've no objection. But while they remain open to the idler and the man of independence, and the fellows take two-thirds more money from them than from the professed slow-coach, I think the idlers have a right to their consideration.

Now, my dear boy, don't mistake me. I do not expect that that fat rosy-gilled old buffer of a tutor, to whom you introduced me, and who cares for nothing but eating and drinking, should come to you and say, "My dear Mr. Scribble, I feel that foxhunting is the only thing worth living for shut up that very disgusting book which, by its abominable Greek character, will inevitably spoil your eyes. I know you have a sufficient income, and will have a very much larger one, with a good living in your gift: do as you like here-only don't break the chapel windows go out hunting as often as you please: never mind hall or chapel; and if you could oblige me by generally wearing your pink in quad, or riding your horse to his stables through Peckwater, it gives the college such a lively appearance-it would be really conferring a great

favour upon us, and showing the world that we are too progressive to regard musty old statutes about vestes subfusca'-only applicable to the monks of old." I say I do not expect quite so much consideration as this. But if they would only allow you, as they did me, to walk out of my rooms with a great coat over my pink, and get comfortably on to my horse outside of the college-gates, without playing at hide-and-seek, like a young rabbit, first into the buttery, then into the kitchen, then up a staircase, and then down the coal-hole, to avoid the dean, the bursąr, the principal, and a Roman Catholic priest with a protestant living, who are all on the look-out for you, under the generalship of a suborned scout, it would make you, young gentleman, very much steadier in your habits than you are now. I know we Oxbridge men did say that there was such a thing as being too fast: anything very outrageous was too like Camford that's some years ago. Severity has either levelled all distinctions, or made them too startling in Oxbridge. Some are so very hard, that I suppose all the bricks in the college have tumbled out at their approach; others are so very soft, that they felt ashamed of their bread-and-butter. Every man that is not a saint is most assuredly fast merging into an irreparable sinner.

I like your horses exceedingly. They have a great deal of fashion combined with usefulness. Good looks are really essential to a gentleman's stud. Doubtless there are many good horses cross-made, largeheaded, even one-eyed, and unsound; but (there is the difference) they are not a gentleman's horses. By good-looking horses, as hunters, I do not mean neat-looking, pretty horses. I prefer pretty women to handsome ones my judgment in horseflesh is the reverse. A fine, slashing, handsome horse, that looks like a gentleman (a gentleman all over, as the dealers say), cannot be described in any other terms. A pretty horse may be described in different ways, by the different persons who have anything to do with him. "Quot homines, tot sententiæ." The dealer says a very neat fashionable horse-do for anything, and look uncommon well in leather.” Your sister, or your sweetheart (save the mark! I hope you haven't got one at your time of life) says, "Oh! what a dear! Do look at his legs (so you ought, by Jove!); and what a lovely tail." And you say (when you've ridden him) "Come up, you brute! Of all the soft-hearted beasts I ever rode, you are the worst: I'll be hanged if he hasn't cut it already." Now I do not mean that by a good-looking horse: I mean a wiry, hunter-like looking animal-not scarred, and blemished, and bunged, and bedevilled with hard riding, before he got to you; but just sufficiently pulled into form to know his business, and sufficiently young and freshlooking not to be called "the old horse." Gentlemen ought not to ride badly-blemished horses; with one exception, in favour of parsons. They are, however, very common in the provincial hunting countriesnot in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. They always look like little money, and generally, of course, are. Sometimes admirable performers; and that is why I except parsons from my advice. They always like to go, or would not come out, and never ought to be down. I know nothing that looks so infra dig. as a very neat white neckcloth, black coat and leathers, in search of stray cattle in a fallow-field. On this account a good bold old horse, well knocked about, will suit the curate's pocket, as well as his practice.

On the two horses you have, I think, you are likely to see a great deal of sport. Some men are apt to buy only hunters: I am glad to see that you will be able to go to cover without breaking your neck or his knees, and get home again. Only fancy the pleasure of the day, in which, after astor shing the field, you were pretty certain to astonish the road.

Two horses is an excellent allowance for a young provincial to begin the world with: and in many counties more real sport may be got out of them than out of six in the large grass fields of Leicestershire. First, you may always get your three days a week out of them well. In Oxbridge 'tis as much time as you can well spare. You never need have a second horse out. This is almost a necessary in the flying countries. No horse that ever was foaled can stand more than twenty minutes' best pace over ridge and furrow. You know, my boy, your old uncle is no advocate for the swaggering snobbism which asks the second horseman, "I say, Thompson, how many have we got out to-day?" but a fresh horse is a very pleasant thing for a fresh fox; and when you come here you must have one. Another thing is this: you will not be able to ride in a fast country, and in a great crowd, made up of first-flight men, on first-rate cattle, heavy dragoons, light infantry, about a third of London out for a holiday, the pick of a neighbouring spa, and a tail of unmitigated ruffians, as long as a comet, nearly so well as in your own county, amongst half-a-hundred of jolly good fellows, who would prefer not to ride over you if you happened to be down. You might buy distinction in the latter at a moderate price: 'tis a hundred to one against your getting it in the former at any price at all. It wants not only pluck-which doubtless you think you havebut horses, head, and experience-which you certainly have not (they will come in time). Besides, you are not wanted. They have no regard for respectability like yours-nothing between a baron and a blackleg. There are men always to be found who beat you youngsters at everything-more horses, more pluck, more wit, more sense, more whiskers, more tin, more tick, and more impudence-so stay away from a crack country if you want to begin well; and when you intend visiting them, I may perhaps tell you the best form to appear in.

I like your system of summer-conditioning much. Happily that ridiculous notion of green meat and fat is almost exploded. I know a professor of it; and his horses go broken-winded faster than anybody's. But I know, on the other side, a gentleman who does just the other thing. I saw in the summer sixteen horses of Mr. H-ll's, of Klsby, and I think any of them might have been ridden for fifty minutes with the greatest safety. I never saw finer condition in my life: they are magnificent horses, truly! but what a pull the rider must have at the beginning of the season, on such condition as that! Do you remember the old parson I pointed out to you? That man's horse i ever shuts up: he's as ready for a burst on the first of June as some men s are by the first of February. The horse has had four feeds a-day for four years: he doesn't know what a vetch is, nor a day's rest -perhaps this is a little trop fort! "Dum stultè vitant vitia, in contraria currunt"—but 'tis a fault on the right side.

Some years ago there was in Leicestershire a nobleman-one of the very hardest men to hounds of late years. On drafting the stud at the

end of the season, one good horse (but not supposed to be quite up to the mark as to pace) was sent up to London to be put into his lordship's cab for the summer. It so happened, that on the re-commencement of the hunting season the stud was short, and the gentleman in leather cut the currier's business, and returned to the old trade. The very first day that the cab-horse was out he dropped in for a clipper. His lordship was not to be denied; and as he was the only one that saw the run (to say nothing of a dead horse or two), it gave him such a lesson in summer-conditioning, that I shouldn't be surprised to hear that he drives the whole stud in turn. Whether the "Rejected" kept his place afterwards or not, I can't say; but I know his rider admitted that he had not another that could have done it on that occasion. Condition will almost make a fast horse out of a slow one. But if you expect a quadruped which has been indulging in idleness on tan or straw, with two or three feeds of corn even, and vetches in proportion, for about four months, to be in November what he was in last March or April, you will find yourself mistaken. Only conceive a fellow indulging from April till August in fish, soup, an entrée, the joint, apricot-tart, champagne, and a bottle of claret, daily, with the exercise he could get in walking round the club-table in search of the Sporting Magazine, attempting to run by the side of a Highland gillie over a Scotch moor of some thousand acres. What would be the consequence ? The first mile, profuse perspiration; the second, a cold sweat and application to the whiskey-and-water; the third, partial blindness and bellows to mend; the fourth, prostration, with a fuller persuasion of the reality of death than he ever had before. What must be the state of a horse when he arrives at this stage of the disorder-kicked along by a pair of spurs, with twelve stone attached to them?

Your inquiry after a cover hack reminds me of a subject on which, as a young gentleman just entering life, you may stand in need of information. In nothing has the rising generation so degenerated as in its choice of equipage in general; I might add, park hacks in particular. Is it because everybody rides, and the demand is greater than the supply? or is it that in all things connected with elegance of manner and exterior you are not what your fathers were? Who, do you suppose, when I was a young man, sat down in the drawing-room of a lady in a shooting-jacket, or whatever you please to call those skirtless, nameless garments that smell of Moses, Doudney, Nicholls & Co. ? Your paying five guineas for the same thing of Storey, or Bennett, only makes it more durable-not a bit more respectable. But then it's French! Is it? So much the worse: I was taught to hate the French. The most elegant Frenchman in England, poor D'Orsay! had not adopted the degagée, cock-your-leg-up style of the present day in my time. Why, sir! by the manner of you boys in a drawing-room, one would think you only came there to throw the handkerchief. I used to hope thirty years ago that we had reached that happy distinction between the deference of slavery and the nonchalance of puppyism in our approach to the fair sex: but the present race have taught me my mistake the Reform Bill did not stop with the House of Commons. However, this is all irrelevant to the purpose. Revenons à nos

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moutons.

I conclude that, as a youth of some promise, and more conceit, and