Such early books as Egan's _Tom and Jerry_ (1821) can hardly be called novels: but as the love of sport extended and the term itself ceased to designate merely on the one side the pleasures of country squires, and on the other the amusements (sometimes rather blackguard in character) of men about town, the general subject made a lodgment in fiction.

One of its most characteristic practitioners was Robert Smith Surtees, who, before Dickens and perhaps acting as suggester of the original plan of _Pickwick_ (_not_ that which Dickens substituted), excogitated (between 1831 and 1838) the remarkable fictitious personage of "Mr.Jorrocks," grocer and sportsman, whose adventures, and those of other rather hybrid characters of the same kind, he pursued through a number of books for some thirty years.

These (though in strict character, and in part of their manners, deficient as above noticed) were nearly always readable--and sometimes very amusing--even to those who are not exactly Nimrods: and they were greatly commended to others still by the admirable illustrations of Leech.

There is not a little sound sport in Kingsley and afterwards in Anthony Trollope: while the novels of Frank Smedley, _Frank Fairlegh_ (1850), _Lewis Arundel_ (1852), and _Harry Coverdale's Courtship_ (1855), mix a good deal more of it with some good fun and some rather rococo romance.

The subject became, indeed, very popular in the fifties, and entered largely into, though it by no means exclusively occupied, the novels of George John Whyte-Melville, a Fifeshire gentleman, an Etonian, and a guardsman, who, after retiring from the army, served again in the Crimean War, and, after writing a large number of novels, was killed in the hunting field.