I do not suppose that William Somerville, the poet of “The Chase,” is much read nowadays, though, doubtless, musty and dust-covered, his poems lie among the neglected classics in the libraries of most country houses. Yet he can lay better claim than any other bard to the title of “Laureate of the Hunting Field” and he was a royal good sportsman to boot. “A squire, well-born and six foot high,” is his own description of himself to his brother poet, Allan Ramsay; and among the squires of his native Warwickshire he held a foremost place. For his estates brought him in £1,500 a year—a rental equivalent to at least £4,000 in the present day. A jovial soul he was, too, with a heart as big as his body. Generous to a fault, and freehanded in his spending of money, William Somerville, like many good sportsmen of the same type before and since, ran through his patrimony before he was forty. His friend, William Shenstone, another almost forgotten poet, gives us a melancholy picture of the latter days of the sporting squire, whose verses won the high commendation of Johnson and Addison. “Plagued and threatened by wretches that are low in every sense, he was forced to drink himself into pains of the body, to get rid of the pains of the mind.” He died in 1742, and was buried at Wotton, near Henley-in-Arden. In the churchyard there is a monumental urn erected to his memory by Shenstone, but “_Tempus edax rerum_” has made the inscription almost indecipherable.
I am reminded of Somerville in writing this rambling gossip on hunting men, because no one has depicted with more animation and spirit than he the opening of the hunting season; and there are at any rate three lines of his which are familiar to all educated sportsmen, if only through Mr. Jorrocks’s emendation:
“My hoarse-sounding horn Invites thee to the Chase, the Sport of Kings, Image of war without its guilt.”
It is to Somerville, then, that we owe the phrase, “the sport of Kings,” more often, with better reason, nowadays, applied to the Turf.
Indeed, the Chase no longer merits the designation in its literal sense, for Royalty is conspicuous by its absence from the hunting field. I note, too, that English statesmen are no longer so keen to ride with hounds as they once were. Golf seems to have more charms for Ministers than hunting. Time was when Premiers and Secretaries of State were as familiar figures at a meet of hounds as at a meeting of the Cabinet. Sir Robert Walpole, the Duke of Grafton, Lord Althorp, Lord Palmerston, Earl Granville, were all hard riders to hounds and loved no sport better than the Chase. Even Mr. Gladstone, though not much of a sportsman in his later life, was, I am told, in his earlier days sometimes to be seen in Nottinghamshire, mounted on his old white mare, galloping after hounds with his friend and Parliamentary patron, the Duke of Newcastle. And I have met those who remember seeing the “Grand Old Man” at a still earlier period of his career, in Berwickshire, keeping close up to Willie Hay, of Dunse Castle, during a hard run.