That such sports contributed to the jollity and rollicking fun which distinguished the time in which Squire Forester lived, there can be little doubt. In his “Four Georges,” Thackeray gives it as his opinion, that “the England of our ancestors was a merrier England than the island we inhabit,” and that the people, high and low, amused themselves very much more. “One hundred and twenty years ago,” he says, “every town had its fair, and every village its wake. The old poets have sung a hundred jolly ditties about great cudgel playings, famous grinnings through horse-collars, great Maypole meetings, and morris-dances. The girls used to run races, clad in very light attire; and the kind gentry and good parsons thought no shame in looking on.” He adds, “I have calculated the manner in which statesmen and persons of condition passed their time; and what with drinking and dining, and supping and cards, wonder how they managed to get through their business at all.” That they did manage to work, and to get through a considerable amount of it, is quite clear; and probably they did so with all the more ease in consequence of the amusement which often came first, as in the case of “Naughty idle Bobby,” as Clive was called when a boy; and not less so in that of Pitt, who did so much to develop that spirit of patriotism of which we boast. It was a remark of Addison, that “those who have searched most into human nature observe that nothing so much shows the nobleness of the soul as that its felicity consists in action;” and that “every man has such an active principle in him that he will find out something to employ himself upon in whatever place or state he is posted.”
Those familiar with the _Spectator_ will remember that he represents himself to have become so enamoured of the chase, that in his letters from the country he says: “I intend to hunt twice a week during my stay with Sir Roger, and shall prescribe the moderate use of this exercise to all my country friends as the best kind of physic for mending a bad constitution and preserving a good one.” He concludes with the following quotation from Dryden:—
“The first physicians by debauch were made; Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade: By chase our long-liv’d fathers earned their food; Toil strung their arms and purified their blood.”