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BAILY'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE

OF

SPORTS AND PASTIMES.

SIR REGINALD GRAHAM, BART.

PROMINENT among the young men of the period who patronise our 'National Sports,' is Sir Reginald Graham, who bids fair to be as great an ornament to them, as his father, Sir Bellingham Graham, whose name is still held in grateful reminiscence at Melton, and wherever fox-hunters most do congregate.

Sir Reginald Graham was born at Norton Conyers, in Yorkshire, in 1835, and succeeded his father, as the eighth baronet of that name, on June 15th, 1866. He received his education at Sandhurst, on quitting which, he joined the 14th Regiment, and proceeded to the Crimea. While here engaged, he served at the siege of Sebastopol, and, after its capture, was appointed to a company in the Rifle Brigade, in which corps he served until 1863, when he finally retired from the service. The son of such a distinguished Master of the Quorn and of one who, when on the Turf, had won the St. Leger with The Duchess, was naturally born to race, and hunt, as a young Stockwell is to run. And it was not long before the Sporting World saw that the subject of this memoir was his father's son, and afforded every prospect of treading in his sire's steps; for he may be said to have been scarcely out of his eggshell,' before we find him owning Liston and Marble Hill, with whom he did a fair share of business in the steeplechase line. But Sir Reginald had a soul above Selling Stakes, and Consolation Scrambles, and, aiming at higher game, he purchased from John Osborne Miss Euclid and Romping Girl. This proved a fortunate venture for him, as the latter, when running in Lord Westmoreland's name, after having been placed third for the Cesarewitch to Julius, carried off the Great Yorkshire Handicap, the Shrewsbury Cup, the Great Midland Handicap at Warwick, besides the Queen's Plates at Doncaster and Warwick. She is, moreover, at the present time one of the prominent

VOL, XVI.-NO. III.

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favourites for the Chester Cup, which is so shortly to be decided. That the son and heir of Sir Bellingham Graham should be a patron of the Noble Science may be deemed a foregone conclusion, and in the Beaufort Hunt, of which he is a member, and, from his close intimacy with its noble Master, a constant patron, he has given undeniable proof of his ardour for the Chase, and among the Buff and Blue there are none that play a more conspicuous part with hounds. And he was one of the Duke of Beaufort's Expeditionary Corps, which he formed some six years back, for the purpose of killing wolves in the south of France, and which created such a sensation in that country, although a single wolf only rewarded the Beaufort hounds. As, next to hunting, Sir Bellingham preferred yachting to any other amusement, so his son has evinced the same partiality for the amusement; and he is as well known at Cowes, as at Newmarket, although the Cygnet cannot bear comparison with the Flirt, which was his father's crack vessel, and considered one of the clippers of the Royal Yacht Squadron.

Of Sir Bellingham Graham as a Master of Hounds, we may state, that he was nulli secundus, at a time when giants may be said to have existed in the land. For he was contemporary with Osbaldeston, Sir Harry Goodricke, Mr. Musters, and Assheton Smith. During his career, he commenced with the Badsworth country, which he took from Mr. Musters, and hunted for two years. He then succeeded Mr. Osbaldeston in the Atherstone country, and, after a short time, he took the Pytchley, on the resignation of Sir Charles Knightley, and from thence he went to the Quorn, where he had the largest subscription ever known to be paid to a M.F.H. From the Quorn he went to the Albrighton, and he finally settled down in Shropshire. In all of these countries he showed extraordinary sport, and kept his fields in the most wonderful order, simply by his own gentlemanly behaviour, which made it always a pleasure to hunt with him. As a judge of hounds he had no equal, as may be imagined, when Mr. Osbaldeston gave him eleven hundred pounds for twenty-five couple. And he may be said to have educated some of the best hunting servants of the age, such as Joe Maiden, Will Staples, and Jack Wrigglesworth, all of whom were striking evidences of his tuition. Of horses, he knew as much as

he did of hounds, and he may be termed an all-round judge,' for nothing came amiss to him, a hunter, a coach-horse, or a hack; and when he had the Quorn, no one possessed so many good big horses. Many years before his death he had ceased all connection with the Turf, and the Sporting World. But he occasionally might be seen in the bow-window of Boodle's, with Mr. Maxse, Colonel Lowther, and one or two of his contemporaries, who belonged to a set of men who have now ceased to exist. Upon his model Sir Reginald Graham has moulded himself, and from his popularity with all classes in the Sporting World, we should say, with perfect success -so much so, indeed, we are induced to think he could not have adopted a happier Exemplar.

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MORITURUS.

HAS it come to the worst? Draw the pen through his name-
Let him die as he lived-be there never a stain
To blazon disgrace on his scutcheon of fame,
That deeply imprinted shall ever remain.

Let it never be whispered that hunger for gold
Retarded an instant the seal of his doom;
That into the hands of the Philistines sold

He feasted the vampires who rifled his tomb;
That he lured to their fate, like a false beacon-light,
The victims who strove with the waves of despair;
Deluding a moment the mariner's sight,

Then leaving his lost hopes to vanish in air.

No-fondly as o'er our departed we mourn,
And cherish the lineaments fading away ;
We hasten the festering corse to inurn,

Nor taint with its presence the sweetness of day.

Engraven on brass are the records of grace,
Unwritten the annals of infamy stand;

What story of Thormanby's fame can efface

The horror The Earl's recollections command ?

The rose which has bowed her fair head to the rain,
And wept all her petals, like tears, to the earth,
No transient gleam can awaken again,

No zephyr her glory renew from its birth.

The pale scattered leaves ye may deftly embalm,
And prison a while the last sweets of her breath ;.
But vainly ye cherish each mouldering charm,
And sickly and faint is the odour of death.

Your hero is dead-let the curtain descend,
Like a shroud o'er the features so ghastly and hard;
No semblance of life should his ashes attend,
No folly his funeral honours retard.

Far better his name, like a tale that is told,
Should float on the waters of Lethe away;
And Pity the fleeting remembrance uphold

Of all that was brightest and best in his day;

Than that Infamy's curse to his memory should cling,
While bitter Contempt points the finger of scorn
At deeds to which time no oblivion can bring;

A night which shall never be gladdened by morn.

AMPHION.

CURRANT JELLY.

BY B. T. C.

'Fecundæ leporis sapiens sectaberis armos.'

WHETHER the accomplished satirist who thus wrote of the art, among many other things, of carving a hare was inspired with a gourmet's point of view in selecting the 'wing '—whether, indeed, the latter word may be accepted as a correct translation of the ultimate hereabove quoted, or should, according to our modern ideas, give place to 'thigh '—whether or not the poet participated in the vulgar notion of the day that hares were rather more masculine than feminine, but that they were always good eating, and had no close seasonthese are points on which we might perhaps have cobbled a fair paper some ten years ago in the upper fifth, but which find us now a little past mark of mouth, and, to tell the truth, somewhat more indifferent from day to day. More readily would we speculate as to the probability of the excellent gentleman having kept a few couple of beagles on his Sabine farm, and enjoying an occasional brush with a fox over the wild campagna-timber fences, doubtless, wholly unknown-a feature with regard to which Prince Napoleon and Mr. Knight must rejoice that they live in altered times.

We have often heard it complained that, in the more numerous and fashionable devoteeism accorded to foxhunting, harriers do not quite receive their due share of recognition, and are but inadequately expounded as a large and important branch of the field-sports of Great Britain. Authors of every degree have poured forth prose and verse in the apparently inexhaustible subject of the chase.' The great Nimrod' himself dedicated his best pamphlet, of ‘Quarterly ' fame, under this very title, to the wearers of scarlet—“ all that' (as the auctioneers would say) series of pleasant stories, of which we can now, alas! hope for no more, so amusingly told by Mr. Surtees, so inimitably iilustrated by John Leech, are for the greater part drawn in favour of the M. F. H.-anon a quondam Master of the Pytchley, and a Regius Professor at Cambridge, each in their charming novels make the very cry of foxhounds echo in our ears-while, with Beckford's thoughts in the past school, and Scrutator's in the present, the science of foxhunting' can complain of no dearth of prophets. Yet, with the exception of an 'extraordinarily good day' with, let us say, the Duc d'Aumale or Mr. Everett, how rarely do we see a word in print in the interests of harriers! Not, indeed, that concoctions of this sort are always to be accepted without a margin, or that, on the contrary, their absence denotes that there has come to pass nothing worth telling; but it seems strange that hounds, which now-a-days undoubtedly show by far the greatest amount of sport, in the truest and most legitimate sense of the word hunting, should receive such comparatively slight patronage either at the covert side or in the columns of the sporting journals. Who ever heard, for instance, of a special commissioner being told off to an establishment of currant

jellies, though the readers of Baily' know well enough that these learned and agreeable gentlemen often find their way to foxhunting quarters which, for breeding of hounds, kennel management, general turn-out, and sport in the field, could not hold a candle to many a wellappointed pack of harriers? And is it not the fact, that when we hear or speak of a hunting man' in the ordinary acceptation of the term, we do not intend or understand it-at least few of us would do so as being predicable of any one who only joined in the pursuit of puss?

Yet if we turn to the annual kennel list published by the Field,' we see the list of harriers by no means very greatly in a minority of their more fashionable rivals; while if we include numberless other bona fide packs which send up no field-state,' and are perhaps scarcely heard of twenty miles from home, to say nothing of a host of little-goes all over the country, there appears an array with which nothing can compete in the way of numbers, and with regard to which, this fact being placed beyond dispute, we can but inquire the cause of their occupying so second-rate a position in the scale of venerie. We seem here to have two propositions :—on the one hand, a vast number of people, with a proportionate amount of horses, servants, and all sorts of plant,' representing a considerable quorum of the sporting population of these islands, breeding and drafting their establishments with the greatest care, hunting often three and four days a week, frequently in the most charming countries, under the most favourable circumstances, and with everything done, where the menage is of the first water, in very faultless and tip-top style indeed. And yet so modest a reputation does this species of hunting, with which so many are content, season after season, command, that by no possibility, as it seems to us, could it ever be elevated to the rank of a national pastime, or be placed on even terms with the chase of the fox. Let us suppose-for in these days it is well to anticipate any eventuality-let us suppose that in the disturbance of affairs that would ensue on the accession to power of a more than ordinarily democratic and revolutionary government, some one should carry a bill, being supported by a certain section of the community, to put a stop to the preservation of foxes, or indeed to extirpate them altogether, after the manner of the wolves in former years can we believe that men who have hitherto been accustomed to foxhounds would find themselves satisfied with the sudden substitution of what they now do not care to go near, and that, in fact, hare-hunting would assume the principal position among the fieldsports of the United Kingdom? We trow not. And the reason why it has so little hold upon the mind and affections of going men is, its essential tameness-it has no dash.

We have no fear whatever of being misinterpreted or misunderstood by the most sanguine M. H., or of appearing to cast a slight upon a sport which is conducive to the happiness and enjoyment of an infinity of good men and true. Nay, we can even confidently appeal to them, and ask whether they do not in their inmost hearts

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