TO READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS.

We shall be obliged to any sportsman who will send us brief notices of the Royal Hounds, but we must request gentlemen tailors not to bestow upon us the attentions of which they rob their geese and thimbles. Lest it should be supposed that we alone are persecuted by the knights of the needle, subjoined is a sketch of a day with Her Majesty's Buck Hounds, epitomised from the Sunday paper considered the especial organ of field sports.

"It being understood that His Royal Highness Prince Albert intended hunting with the Buck Hounds on Friday the 17th ult., a very numerous field assembled at the place of appointment-Ascot-including several officers of the Blues and 72nd Highlanders, and most of the resident sporting gentry— exhibiting together a good field, well mounted. We were gratified to observe that the Prince looked remarkably well. For the time the run lasted, the Prince, who was seated on a splendid horse, hunted to the hounds, and we think with more confidence than usual, although nothing of a very awful character presented itself in the country gone over. At the conclusion, the Prince and his attendants retired to the Castle."

tesy.

NIGER will find that the Editor has availed himself of his courWill he forward the other portions of his subject soon?

We regret that want of room compels us to postpone the notice of the Puckeridge Hounds. Will B. B. send his proposed communication early this month?

"ROCHESTER." An eminent example of the cheap and nastyconsequent on the alteration in the rates of postage.

Vol. VI. bound in fancy cloth boards, and lettered, is now ready.

HYDE MARSTON ;

OR, RECOLlections oF A SPORTSMAN'S LIFE.

BY THE EDITOR.

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH-IRELAND IN 1821.

"To live at home,

And never roam;
To pass the day in sighing:
To wear sad looks,

Read stupid books,

And look half dead, or dying:

Not shew your face,

Nor join the chase

But dwell a hermit alway

Oh, Charley dear!

To me it's clear

You're not the man for Galway!"

CHARLES O'MALLEY.

SHALL I ever forget my first impressions of Ireland and the Irish? We sail from London to Otahiete, and, reaching the paradise of the Pacific, observe that the costume and customs differ from those we left behind. Tattooing does duty for tailoring, and six inches of linen for as many yards of broad cloth. But the hempen convenience is a strip of sober, reasonable stuff, content to be devoted to one part of the person, and there to discharge the office for which it is intended. Step from a steamer to the pier of Kingstown, or St. George's quay, and mark the habits and manners of the natives. That form, buttoned up to the throat, in what was once a great coat, surmounted by an apology for a hat, belongs to one of the fair sex, who, peradventure, dealeth in "herrings and live cod ;" and that young gentleman at her side, is the first-born of her love, who, with his arms stuck through the legs of his father's corduroys, trusts it may be thought he wears a jacket, and, nobly independent, leaves the residue of his symmetry as it pleased Providence to turn it out. But what of that? Fun is "the charter of the land," and is not a light heart, a light heart, whether it beat beneath a waistcoat of Persian velvet, or the tattered sackcloth that stands for a shirt? I take my green islander, and administer to him a drop of that elixir which transforms his rags to robes, and his mud-cabin to a marble palace. Hark! from out a bag which the dying remon

of sorely defiled leather one squeezeth notes to strances of the tenant of the stye are as the music of the spheres. The son of Erin drinketh in the minstrelsy. Little careth he for the "concord of sweet sounds." His end and aim are fun-fun breathed in

Lydian measures, or blasted from the throat of a jungle tiger. Behold! his internal spirit cutteth a caper; above his streaming locks waveth the sprig of shillelagh, and he poureth forth a strain—

"Och! piper, your music so sweetly comes over me,

Naked I'll wander wherever it blows,

And if my father should wish to discover me,

Sure it won't be by describing my clothes."

Some tourist has said (or, if he didn't, he might have said) that a scarlet coat and an English accent are the Peter's keys of Irish society. At the period I write of, the most eminent lion at the vice-regal parties was a Lieutenant of the regiment, whose father retailed the intestines of animals, in the state known as tripe, at the corner of Goodge-street, Tottenham-court-road. This allusion to esculents warns me to resume the thread of my story. I parted from the reader at a moment when the loss of one mistress had swallowed up all my hopes, and the attainment of another seemed to make it by no means improbable that I should share the fate of my prospects. The existence of these memoirs, is, however, evidence of my escape, and relieves the sympathetic of their anxieties. If everybody selected the most remarkable moral, or natural curiosity of which he or she had experience, and bequeathed the record to posterity, what a library it would furnish! My legacy would, unquestionably, be a gastronomic sketch of Euphemia W--. An ingenious calculator has recently ascertained that, on an average, each member of society, at the age sixty, has disposed of thirty tons of animal food. Had he adopted, as his datum, the style of feeding common to a young lady who made her third course off a couple of roast fowls, I wonder what his estimate would have been !

of

I mated not with the daughter of Erin. The elder Marston, albeit choleric, as we have seen him, and obstinate as a pig or a priest, was every inch a gentleman, and, withal, not divested of bowels, as regarded his son. He was, moreover, thoroughly English-abating no jot of the prejudice that John Bull claims as his privilege. Perhaps the money-bags might have induced him to tolerate, as a daughter-inlaw, a damoiselle who, in the matter of victuals, would have astonished a company of French falconers. But her parts of speech, cacologies "barbarous and unnatural," were beyond the philosophy of any man who first saw the light east of St. George's Channel. To convey a general idea of the tone and quality of her voice; when she spoke, as Byron says, you would have imagined" an ass was practising recitative"-an Irish donkey, with a brogue rank and remorseless enough to burst the walls of a cellar. Parties, also, at that time, ran very high: in Dublin, Orangemen flavoured their claret with a wholesale consignment of the

Church of Rome to the fire that never quencheth; while, in the provinces, Ribbonmen returned the compliment, by cutting the tails off the enemy's black cattle, and encompassing their chattels in flames, that generally did as much as was required of them, before they were extinguished. Now my father was a high-church man (politically)— an uncompromising Tory of the George the Third school, and the General, an ultra-unlimitedly-liberal Whig. In reference to our particular party, the social horizon became overcast on the third or fourth day after we joined it. The storm soon burst. Whether "the Glorious Memory," or the "Veto," brought about the crisis, I do not now remember, but it did come, with a vengeance; and, waving details, the next morning saw the two Saxons breakfasting together at Morrisson's, in Dawson-street. "Hyde," said the elder, "give me another kidney:-the villanous, pot-bellied nigger-driver! Nothing should prevent my reporting his treason to the Horse Guards, but that I know he 'll come to be hanged. He'll bring himself to the gallows, and save honest people the trouble. It was a mercy the old rascal's roof didn't fall before we were clear of it."

Such was the coup de grâce to my hymeneals, and, with escape from pressing and instant peril, came the hour of reflection. Heaven knows it brought but little pleasant to ponder on. I had found life no summer sea, as far as my voyage extended, and the prospect for its progress was anything but hopeful. But I was not alone, the most fearful of all human positions: for sorrow and shame, for pain and penury, there is the balm of sympathy; in the grave, man is but parted from his grosser self-solitude is the tomb of the soul. Hastiness and instability, frequently characteristics of the most eminent philosophers, statesmen, and soldiers, are impulses that prompt them to adopt measures and conclusions which instinct seizes on as the most fitting and convenient. Without a fraction of philosophy in his composition, my father always jumped at his best conclusions. As we strolled out after breakfast, he proceeded to lay before me a scheme for my future arrangements, which, I am satisfied, suggested itself to him as he detailed it. My continuance at Oxford was left an open question, to be settled on my return home, an event he desired should be postponed for a month or two. That space I was to occupy in Ireland, as it might best please me, either in the metropolis, or by a series of country visits the part I was to play in life would be selected for me when next we met.

Had Plato or Socrates been employed to devise a plan suited to the circumstances of the case, they could not have contrived a better. Quiet, rarely a synonyme with happiness till we have passed our grand climacteric, to one at my age, and in my position, was a thing to fly

are "turned loose." Holding a horse together-waiting-lying with the field-collaring-all the fine points of race-riding, are either unknown, or disregarded; and he who comes away at score, and finishes "upon the whip," is the boy for an Irish race.

When the robbery was practised at the Curragh, six years since, by a member for the county of Kildare, who ran, and won with, an English three-year-old Becassine, as an Irish two-year-old Caroline, I took occasion to see Mr. Montgomery, the keeper of the matchbook, and secretary to the Irish Turf Club, upon the matter. In the course of conversation I learned from him, that, in naming for stakes, nothing more was necessary than that the sire and dam should be stated; so that the substitution of live nominations for those that might die, before the day of running, or good for bad, after they were tried, as Liston expressed it, would be "quite hoptional."

I shall have to speak, presently, of the fox-hunting and other field sports of Ireland, but we are now on the Curragh, and, through the politeness of Mr. Kirwan, a member of the Turf Club, introduced into the stand. Nothing could be more striking to an English eye, or more delicious to the traveller, arrived from a dusty lime-stone highway, than the prospect afforded from it.

Though it was midsummer, intensely hot, and no rain had fallen for weeks, the turf was as bright and brilliant as the glow of an emerald. But where were the people? Was I in a land proverbial for its love of pleasure, and could such a scene muster but a few dozens of the gentle, and a few hundred shillelaghs? Our yellow inconvenience was the only equipage to be seen-and the cavaliers consisted, almost exclusively, of stalwart yeomen, mounted upon steeds that carried their tails precisely as Providence had not ordained they should be borne, and buttoned up to the nose in ponderous great coats of blue frieze, the thermometer being about 90° in the shade. But if the goddess whose temple was at Ephesus had cause to be dissatisfied, so had not the divinity whose shrine was at Paphos. The stand was chiefly occupied by young ladies from Dublin, and the vicinity of the course, and by a body of heavy dragoons from head-quarters at Newbridge, whose brass band and kettle-drums, in an adjoining chamber, appeared bent on accomplishing the feat performed at Jericho. I have seen tolerable sweethearting in my time, but never anything like that. Imagine some scores of sweet little ears, graceful and pearly as shells that ever cradled Peri, shrouded in the gloomy thickets that men call moustaches. Imagine the dear roses above them, blushing "deeper and deeper still," while past all conceiving are the vows of fire that dye them to crimson. Fancy this if you may, and you will have before you an outline of the mask of Mars et Venus as enacted on this occasion at the Curragh of Kildare.