Whyte-Melville
Gutenburg, the Foxhunter’s Freund
With this final installment of The Mardale Hunt, we bring Ron Black’s touching vignettes of the Mardale Hunt to a close. In the course of offering these downloads, a new idea presented itself. But before we get to that, let’s have a final look at Mardale.
The Mardale Hunt
Every hunting culture is unique to its time and place. I was won over by the people of Mardale—hard-working sheep farmers—who lived in a picturesque valley and hunted the fox in the purest way.
A Rum One to Follow, A Bad One to Beat
George Whyte-Melville as caricatured in Vanity Fair, 1871You may have noticed that White-Melville and Ogilvie are my favorite poets. These two establish a cadence in their meter that transports me to the field atop a horse, rhythmically pumping his hindquarters and stretching his neck beneath me.
I was pleased to learn from the Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sirs Stephen and Lee, that Whyte-Melville, being a gentleman of means, “devoted all the earnings of his pen...to philanthropic and charitable objects, especially to the provision of reading rooms and other recreation for grooms and stable boys in hunting quarters.”
This poem has long been a favorite of mine. Whyte-Melville, having been a major in the cavalry and having devoted his life to foxhunting, was an able horseman, I'm certain. Yet though he was thrown out this day, he expresses his admiration for the rider who left him in the dust.
