acknowledged
system, and know what they are doing. But the men who don't like it,
have no system, and never know distinctly what is their own aim.
During some portion of their career they commonly try to ride hard,
and sometimes for a while they will succeed. In short spurts, while the
cherry-brandy prevails, they often have small successes; but even with
the assistance of a spur in the head they never like it.

Dear old John Leech! What an eye he had for the man who hunts and
doesn't like it! But for such, as a pictorial chronicler of the hunting
field he would have had no fame. Briggs, I fancy, in his way did like
it. Briggs was a full-blooded, up-apt, awkward, sanguine man, who was
able to like anything, from gin and water upwards. But with how many a
wretched companion of Briggs' are we not familiar? men as to whom
any girl of eighteen would swear from the form of his visage and the
carriage of his legs as he sits on his horse that he was seeking honour
where honour was not to be found, and looking for pleasure in places
where no pleasure lay for him.

But the man who hunts and doesn't like it, has his moments of
gratification, and finds a source of pride in his penance. In the
summer, hunting does much for him. He does not usually take much
personal care of his horses, as he is probably a town man and his horses
are summered by a keeper of hunting stables; but he talks of them.
He talks of them freely, and the keeper of the hunting stables is
occasionally forced to write to him. And he can run down to look at his
nags, and spend a few hours eating bad mutton chops, walking about the
yards and paddocks, and, bleeding halfcrowns through the nose. In all
this there is a delight which offers some compensation for his winter
misery to our friend who hunts and doesn't like it.

He finds it pleasant to talk of his horses especially to young women,
with whom, perhaps, the ascertained fact of his winter employment does
give him some credit. It is still something to be a hunting man even
yet, though the multiplicity of railways and the existing plethora of
money has so increased the number of sportsmen, that to keep a nag or
two near some well-known station, is nearly as common as to die. But
the delight of these martyrs is at the highest in the presence of their
tailors; or, higher still, perhaps, in that of their bootmakers. The
hunting man does receive some honour from him who makes his breeches;
and, with a well-bala