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Updated: May 14, 2025
Our company now amounted to two hundred men, all on horseback; for the Moors never use infantry in their wars. They appeared capable of enduring great fatigue; but from their total want of discipline our journey to Jarra was more like a fox-chase than the march of an army.
It was my aim to get well on the road before Early could collect these scattered forces, and as many of the officers had been in the habit of amusing themselves fox-hunting during the latter part of the winter, I decided to use the hunt as an expedient for stealing a march on the enemy, and had it given out officially that a grand fox-chase would take place on the 29th of February.
But he sent a fleet ship to England to bring him a number of fox-dogs, and he with his officers settled himself down to chase the fox. It is true what I tell you. Behind the lines of Torres Vedras these mad Englishmen made the fox-chase three days in the week. We had heard of it in the camp, and now I was myself to see that it was true.
The rough life they led, and the frequent exposure to intense cold, had considerably weakened a frame which had never been robust, and an occasional cough, when he told a long story, sometimes warned him to desist. Games, too, were got up. "Hide and seek" was revived with all the enthusiasm of boyhood, and "fox-chase" was got up with tremendous energy.
"But these great purposes will never be answered by electing an illiterate savage, scarce qualified, in point of understanding, to act as a country justice of peace, a man who has scarce ever travelled beyond the excursion of a fox-chase, whose conversation never rambles farther than his stable, his kennel, and the barnyard; who rejects decorum as degeneracy, mistakes rusticity for independence, ascertains his courage by leaping over gates and ditches, and founds his triumph on feats of drinking; who holds his estate by a factious tenure, professes himself the blind slave of a party, without knowing the principles that gave it birth, or the motives by which it is actuated, and thinks that all patriotism consists in railing indiscriminately at ministers, and obstinately opposing every measure of the administration.
It was my aim to get well on the road before Early could collect these scattered forces, and as many of the officers had been in the habit of amusing themselves fox-hunting during the latter part of the winter, I decided to use the hunt as an expedient for stealing a march on the enemy, and had it given out officially that a grand fox-chase would take place on the 29th of February.
In Captain Brown's "Popular Natural History," I find the following: "In the autumn of the year 1819, at a fox-chase in Galloway, a very strong fox was hard run by the hounds.
Their glossy breasts glittered with coppery lustre in the straggling sunbeams as, with drooping wings and expanded tails, they advanced, looking fearfully about and uttering their low alarm-notes, "Quit! quit! quit!" Three more steps will make a certain shot, and out rang Jack's nasal clarion, loud and clear as the morte at a fox-chase.
Meantime, Pope well knew that the whole was a ridiculous fable. The Duke had the misfortune to be fatally injured in a fox-chase.
In speaking of the foregoing, he says: "The worse the path the more logs, brush, and deep hollows, the better as these obstacles afforded an opportunity for the greater display of intrepidity and horsemanship. The English fox-chase, in point of danger to the riders and their horses, is nothing to this race for the bottle.
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