Person

Fox-hunt
Person
Vela
statute
Prov.17:28
"Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding."

The Mesmerizing Badlands
Badlands National Park

Chess: "fox-hunt" "person" "Vela" "statute"

We may regard fiction…as the vehicle of a certain philosophy of life" [J.B. Priestley ("451 Fahrenheit")]

Vela: a constellation of the Southern Hemisphere in the Milky Way, near Antlia ("the Pump") and Carina ("the Keel")
person "Shirley" "Patagonia" "FOX NEWS": foxed : discolored with yellowish-brown stains, as an old book or print: "their set of George Eliot was foxed and buckled by the rain" [John Cheever ("Jack in the box")] career: "My hasting days fly on with full career." [Milton ("Chapulin")]


Wordsworth exhibited in his poetry, as they had never before
been exhibited, the permanent absolute relations of nature
to the human spirit, interpreted the relations between
the elemental powers of creation and the moral life of man,
and vindicated the inalienable birthright of the lowliest of men
to those inward "oracles of vital deity attesting the Hereafter."
Introduction to Robert Browning by Hiram Corson

Fox hunting is an activity involving the tracking, chase, and sometimes killing of a fox, traditionally a red fox, by trained foxhounds or other scent hounds, and a group of followers led by a master of foxhounds, who follow the hounds on foot or on horseback.
Fox hunting originated in the United Kingdom in the 16th century, but is practised all over the world, including Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Russia, and the United States.^[2][3] In Australia, the term also refers to the hunting of foxes with firearms similar to spotlighting or deer hunting.
The sport is controversial, particularly in the UK, where a ban was introduced in November 2004.^[4] Proponents see it as an important part of rural culture, vital for conservation and pest control,^[5][6][7] while opponents argue that it is cruel and unnecessary.

Ten things you didn't know ...

... about hunting with hounds

· The use of scenthounds to track prey dates back to Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian times, and is known as venery.
· In England, hunting with Agassaei hounds was popular before the Romans arrived. The The Romans brought their own Castorian and Fulpine breeds.
· The earliest known foxhunt with hounds was in 1534, when farmers in Norfolk, England, began chasing down foxes with their dogs as a means of pest control.
· Half of the 318 registered hound packs in England and Wales were founded before 1869.
· Foxhunts caught 13,987 foxes last season.
· The total attendance at all hunting meets last year was 1.28 million people.
· The total expenditure on foxhunting last year was £243.1m.
· There is still one active hound pack that hunts foxes in India - a legacy of the Raj.
· Russia is keen to attract overseas hunters to enjoy its vast tracts of open land, and foxhunting is on the rise in the US, where there are more than 150 recognised hunts.
· Hunts typically employ "whippers-in", who direct hounds in the course of a hunt. Whippers-in inspired the parliamentary system of whips, who enforce party discipline and ensure the attendance of other members at important votes.

The Hunt in Literature

Not surprisingly for an activity that is so deeply embedded in the traditions of pastoral England, fox-hunting has been very much in evidence in the national literature, perhaps even more so than such other iconic pursuits as cricket. The forms in which it has been celebrated range from Henry Fielding's blood-and-thunder heroics to the mistily romantic nostalgia of Siegfried Sassoon.

"The Nobel Science, Jorrocks", 1865. Illustration by John Leech
© The Art Archive / Harper Collins Publishers

Henry Fielding’s 18th century "Hunting Song" (c.1745) is typical of the mock-heroic style with which hunting has traditionally been treated. The hunter’s devil-may-care dismissal of his wife’s plea to him not to go out; the male bonhomie of carousing and drinking (the promise of which concludes the song); the assurance that there is no need to worry about whether there will be any foxes, since the singer has already released dozens of them into the wood the week before: these all form part of hunting’s particular mythology. And in case we are in any doubt about the reckless bravery of the chase, we are treated to the prospect of riders being hurled into ditches in the thick of the frenzy.


The dusky night rides down the sky,
And ushers in the morn;
The hounds all join in glorious cry,
The huntsman winds his horn:
And a hunting we will go.

The wife around her husband throws
Her arms, and begs his stay;
My dear, it rains, and hails, and snows,
You will not hunt to-day.
But a hunting we will go.
A brushing fox in yonder wood,
Secure to find we seek;
For why, I carry'd sound and good
A cartload there last week.
And a hunting we will go.

Away he goes, he flies the rout,
Their steeds all spur and switch;
Some are thrown in, and some thrown out,
And some thrown in the ditch:
But a hunting we will go.

At length is strength to faintness worn,
Poor Reynard ceases flight;
Then hungry, homeward we return,
To feast away the night:
Then a drinking we will go.


In Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749), an impression is given of hunting as a rather rough, vulgar country pursuit that those of fine breeding disdain to engage in, but this is the very heart of its appeal to untutored, true-bred Englishmen. The hunt also provides the plot with its many metaphors of chasing, pursuit and flight.

Robert Smith Surtees and Anthony Trollope

"Mr Jorrocks's Hunt", 1854, from "English Humour" by JB Priestley
© TopFoto.co.uk

Hardly any name resonates more vibrantly in the annals of hunting literature than that of Robert Smith Surtees. Born into a Durham land-owning family, he was a passionate huntsman from youth, and his work is almost entirely preoccupied with the business of hunting. Having launched the New Sporting Magazine in 1831, Surtees went on to become a novelist. His most memorable creation is Mr John Jorrocks, a Cockney grocer whose every waking hour is filled with thoughts of hunting. "I’m a sportsman all over, and to the backbone," he declares. "’Unting is all that’s worth living for – all time is lost wot is not spent in ’unting – it is like the hair we breathe ..."

Surtees’ works include Jorrocks’s Jaunts And Jollities (1838), Handley Cross (1843), Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1853), and the posthumous Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds (1865). An integral part of the books’ charm is the illustrative work by John Leech, principal cartoonist for Punch, who was recommended to Surtees by Thackeray.

Surtees’ work initially fell between two stools, having little appeal to a general audience for whom the world of hunting was a closed book, yet managing to alienate the hunting community, who saw his portrayal of the hapless, coarse and accident-prone Jorrocks as faintly insulting to their dignity. Jorrocks is a deliberately working-class character at a time when hunting was beginning to turn elitist. His manservant and sidekick, James Pigg, is an obtuse Northern tippler, and the dialogue between them provides much of the novels’ merriment.

Lovers of Dickens’ early works (there is a theory that Mr Pickwick owes more than a little to Huntsman Jorrocks) may well find these works unexpectedly rewarding.

Anthony Trollope was another 19th-century writer who insisted on the social inclusivity of hunting. It embraces, he claimed, "attorneys, country bankers, bakers, innkeepers, auctioneers, graziers, builders, retired officers, judges home from India, barristers who take weekly holidays, stockbrokers, newspaper editors, artists and sailors".

Will H Ogilvie

Hunting has a habit of utterly consuming those who enjoy it, as Surtees’ novels prove. In the 1920s, it acquired its own poet laureate, Will H Ogilvie, a turgid, pseudo-Victorian rhymester whose several volumes of hunting verse cover all aspects of the activity, from correct horsemanship to the exercising of hounds. In Our Heritage, Ogilive waxes indignantly sentimental over the mere idea that any temporal law could ever deprive country folk of their proudest tradition.


This is our heritage; the far-flung grass,
The golden stubble and the dark-red moor;
Men pass and perish as the swift years pass,
But wide and wind-swept still the fields endure.

This is our heritage; the love of sport,
A fair ambition and a friendly strife,
The rivalry of farm and camp and court,
The keen endeavour of a clean, hard life.

The hoofs of horses on the trampled lea,
The crash and rattle of the broken rail
Where the first flight ride reckless, knee to knee,
And bold men face the dangers of the vale.

The cry of hounds, the holloa and the horn;
The lean red shadows where the foxes run;
To these and all their challenge we were born,
And these we leave behind us, sire to son.

This is the heritage that none can take,
The gift we hold, the gift we give again,
And this the spirit that no Time can break,
So long as England and her fields remain.

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling also gloomily foresaw a world in which hunting would have no place, giving way in his nightmare vision to country roads overrun with the new-fangled motor car and its attendant dangers, as outlined in the closing lines of a late poem, Fox Hunting (1933):

Then every road was made a rink
For Coroners to sit on;
And so began, in skid and stink,
The real blood-sport of Britain!

Siegfried Sassoon

The great war poet's Memoirs Of A Fox Hunting Man (1928) is a fictionalised autobiographical portrait of a lost England wiped away by the disaster of the first world war. The hunt doesn’t form anything like as central a role in the book as the title would suggest, but is nevertheless one of the pursuits by which Sassoon, in the persona of George Sherston, marks the carefree quality of his early years:

"Yet I find it easy enough to recover a few minutes of that grey south-westerly morning, with its horsemen hustling on in scattered groups, the December air alive with the excitement of the chase, and the dull green landscape seeming to respond to the rousing cheer of the huntsman’s voice when the hounds hit off the line again after a brief check. Away the stream, throwing up little splashes of water as they race across a half-flooded meadow."

By the end of the volume, these memories have begun to be obliterated by the all-consuming experience of action on the battlefields of the Great War. The narrator remarks how the war, driving all before it, appears to drain the present life out of his memories:

"Looking round the room at the enlarged photographs of my hunters, I began to realise that my past was wearing a bit thin. The War seems to have made up its mind to obliterate all those early adventures of mine. Point-to-point cups shone, but without conviction."

In the title poem of a wartime collection, The Old Huntsman (1917), an ageing country type, full of phlegmatic, defiant regret for life’s missed chances, recalls the atmosphere of the hunts, which may have been the only times in his life that made him feel truly alive:

It’s queer how, in the dark, comes back to mind
Some morning of September. We’ve been digging
In a steep sandy warren, riddled with holes,
And I’ve just pulled the terrier out and left
A sharp-nosed cub-face blinking there and snapping,
Then in a moment seen him mobbed and torn
To strips in the baying hurly of the pack.
I picture it so clear: the dusty sunshine
On bracken, and the men with spades, that wipe
Red faces: one tilts up a mug of ale.
And, having stopped to clean my gory hands,
I whistle the jostling beauties out of the wood.

More reflective moments reveal a suspicion that there might have been more to life than hunting, and that the thrill of the chase was perhaps a way of substituting for an essential emptiness:

’Tis little enough I’ve understood my life,
And a power of sights I’ve missed, and foreign marvels.

I used to feel it, riding on spring days
In meadows pied with sun and chasing clouds,
And half forget how I was there to catch
The foxes; lose the angry, eager feeling
A huntsman ought to have, that’s out for blood,
And means his hounds to get it!

There was indeed another world for the young Sassoon, but it lay not in sun-dappled fields, but in the carnage of the Western Front.