Mr. Sponges Sporting Tour | Page 2

With this popular
sport he combined the diversion of fortune-hunting, though we are
concerned to say that his success, up to the period of our introduction,
had not been commensurate with his deserts. Let us, however, hope that
brighter days are about to dawn upon him.
Having now introduced our hero to our male and female friends, under
his interesting pursuits of fox and fortune-hunter, it becomes us to say a
few words as to his qualifications for carrying them on.
Mr. Sponge was a good-looking, rather vulgar-looking man. At a
distance--say ten yards--his height, figure, and carriage gave him
somewhat of a commanding appearance, but this was rather marred by
a jerky, twitchy, uneasy sort of air, that too plainly showed he was not
the natural, or what the lower orders call the real gentleman. Not that
Sponge was shy. Far from it. He never hesitated about offering to a
lady after a three days' acquaintance, or in asking a gentleman to take
him a horse in over-night, with whom he might chance to come in
contact in the hunting-field. And he did it all in such a cool, off-hand,
matter-of-course sort of way, that people who would have stared with
astonishment if anybody else had hinted at such a proposal, really
seemed to come into the humour and spirit of the thing, and to look
upon it rather as a matter of course than otherwise. Then his dexterity

in getting into people's houses was only equalled by the difficulty of
getting him out again, but this we must waive for the present in favour
of his portraiture.
In height, Mr. Sponge was above the middle size--five feet eleven or
so--with a well borne up, not badly shaped, closely cropped oval head,
a tolerably good, but somewhat receding forehead, bright hazel eyes,
Roman nose, with carefully tended whiskers, reaching the corners of a
well-formed mouth, and thence descending in semicircles into a vast
expanse of hair beneath the chin.
Having mentioned Mr. Sponge's groomy gait and horsey propensities,
it were almost needless to say that his dress was in the sporting
style--you saw what he was by his clothes. Every article seemed to be
made to defy the utmost rigour of the elements. His hat (Lincoln and
Bennett) was hard and heavy. It sounded upon an entrance-hall table
like a drum. A little magical loop in the lining explained the cause of its
weight. Somehow, his hats were never either old or new--not that he
bought them second-hand, but when he got a new one he took its
'long-coat' off, as he called it, with a singeing lamp, and made it look as
if it had undergone a few probationary showers.
When a good London hat recedes to a certain point, it gets no worse; it
is not like a country-made thing that keeps going and going until it
declines into a thing with no sort of resemblance to its original self.
Barring its weight and hardness, the Sponge hat had no particular
character apart from the Sponge head. It was not one of those punty
ovals or Cheshire-cheese flats, or curly-sided things that enables one to
say who is in a house and who is not, by a glance at the hats in the
entrance, but it was just a quiet, round hat, without anything remarkable,
either in the binding, the lining, or the band, but still it was a very
becoming hat when Sponge had it on. There is a great deal of character
in hats. We have seen hats that bring the owners to the recollection far
more forcibly than the generality of portraits. But to our hero.
That there may be a dandified simplicity in dress, is exemplified every
day by our friends the Quakers, who adorn their beautiful brown
Saxony coats with little inside velvet collars and fancy silk buttons, and

even the severe order of sporting costume adopted by our friend Mr.
Sponge is not devoid of capability in the way of tasteful adaptation.
This Mr. Sponge chiefly showed in promoting a resemblance between
his neck-cloths and waistcoats. Thus, if he wore a cream-coloured
cravat, he would have a buff-coloured waistcoat, if a striped waistcoat,
then the starcher would be imbued with somewhat of the same colour
and pattern. The ties of these varied with their texture. The silk ones
terminated in a sort of coaching fold, and were secured by a golden
fox-head pin, while the striped starchers, with the aid of a pin on each
side, just made a neat, unpretending tie in the middle, a sort of
miniature of the flagrant, flyaway, Mile-End ones of aspiring youth of
the present day. His coats were of the single-breasted cut-away order,
with pockets outside, and generally either Oxford mixture or some dark
colour, that