OF SPORTS AND PASTIMES. THE LORD MUNCASTER, M.P. DESCENDED from an old Norman family the head of which fixed his abode at Penitone, in Lancashire, on property that is to this day in the possession of his descendants, the Penningtons-the modern improvement on the name-have long borne an honoured name among our north country magnates; and when the head of the house was added to the Irish peerage in the latter part of the last century by the title of Lord Muncaster, the distinction was but a small tribute to high worth and ancient possessions. The family had been held in great esteem by more than one of our Plantagenet kings, and Henry VI. gave to Sir John de Pennington—a faithful and attached servant-a curiously-wrought glass cup, with a prayer 'that the family should never want a male heir so long as the glass was unbroken.' Whether the cup is in existence we are ignorant ; but so runs the legend. Josslyn Francis Pennington, fifth Baron Muncaster and M.P. for West Cumberland, the subject of our present sketch, was born in 1834, and succeeded his brother in 1862. The army was his profession, and his first regiment the 90th Light Infantry, in which he was gazetted to his company in 1856. He served in the Crimea for nearly two years, was with the storming party in the attack on the Redan on the 8th of September, '55, when out of twenty-one officers of his regiment only four came out from action unwounded. Captain Pennington subsequently exchanged into the Rifle Brigade, and left the army shortly before his succession to the title. Since then-his Lordship having married, in 1863, Constance Ann, a daughter of Mr. Edmund L'Estrange and a niece of the seventh Earl of Scarborough-he has resided at Water Priory, in Yorkshire, and latterly at Muncaster Castle, in Cumberland, for a division of which county he was elected member without opposition on the present Lord Lonsdale succeeding to the peerage. Lord Muncaster's life is that of a country gentleman in the full sense of the term. He hunts a little and shoots a good deal, is an enthusiastic fisherman, VOL. XXVIII.—NO. 192. K 2 |