Vermin imported from all Parts.—Fox-Hunting.—Shooting.—Destruction of the Game.—Rural Sports. The king of England has a regular bug-destroyer in his household! a relic no doubt of dirtier times; for the English are a truly clean people, and have an abhorrence of all vermin. This loathsome insect seems to have been imported from France. An English traveller of the early part of the seventeenth century calls it the French punaise; which should imply either that the bug was unknown in his time, or had been so newly imported as to be still regarded as a Frenchman. It is still confined to large cities, and is called in the country, where it is known only by name, 286the London bug; a proof of foreign extraction.
It seems to be the curse of this country to catch vermin from all others: the Hessian fly devours their turnips; an insect from America has fastened upon the apple-trees, and is destroying them; it travels onward about a league in a year, and no means have yet been discovered of checking its progress. The cockroach of the West Indies infests all houses near the river in London, and all sea-port towns; and the Norway rats have fairly extirpated the aboriginal ones, and taken possession of the land by right of conquest. As they came in about the same time as the reigning family, the partisans of the Stuarts used to call them Hanoverians. They multiply prodigiously, and their boldness and ferocity almost surpass belief: I have been told of men from whose heads they have sucked the powder and pomatum during their sleep, and of children whom they have attacked in the night and mangled. 287If the animals of the North should migrate, like their country barbarians, in successive shoals, each shoal fiercer than the last, it is the hamsters’ turn to come after the rats, and the people of England must take care of themselves. An invasion by rafts and gun-boats would be less dangerous.
A lady of J—’s acquaintance was exceedingly desirous, when she was in Andalusia, to bring a few live locusts home with her, that she might introduce such beautiful creatures into England. Certainly, had she succeeded, she ought to have applied to the board of agriculture for a reward.
Foxes are imported from France in time of peace, and turned loose upon the south coast to keep up the breed for hunting. There is certainly no race of people, not even the hunting tribes of savages, who delight so passionately as the English in this sport. The fox-hunter of the last generation was a character as utterly unlike any other in society, and as totally absorbed 288in his own pursuits, as the alchemist. His whole thoughts were respecting his hounds and horses; his whole anxiety, that the weather might be favourable for the sport; his whole conversation was of the kennel and stable, and of the history of his chases. One of the last of this species, who died not many years ago, finding himself seriously ill, rode off to the nearest town, and bade the waiter of the inn bring him in some oysters and porter, and go for a physician. When the physician arrived he said to him, “Doctor, I am devilish ill,—and you must cure me by next month, that I may be ready for foxhunting.” This, however, was beyond the doctor’s power. One of his acquaintance called in upon him some little time after, and asked what was his complaint. “They tell me,” said he, “’tis a dyspepsy. I don’t know what that is, but some damn’d thing or other, I suppose!”—a definition of which every sick man will feel the force.
But this race is extinct, or exists only 289in a few families, in which the passion has so long been handed down from father to son, that it is become a sort of hereditary disease. The great alteration in society which has taken place during the present reign, tends to make men more like one another. The agriculturist has caught the spirit of commerce; the merchant is educated like the nobleman; the sea-officer has the polish of high life; and London is now so often visited, that the manners of the metropolis are to be found in every country gentleman’s house. But though hunting has ceased to be th............