George John Whyte-Melville (1821-1878), has a brief biography in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Ed. He was a grandson on his mother's side of the 5th Duke of Leeds and educated at Eton. He bacame Capt. Coldstream Guards in 1846 and resigned in 1849. [So much for the statement that he was not of the upper classes]. He translated Horace in 1850 and became a novelist. "The unflagging verve and intimate technical knowledge with which he described sporting scenes and sporting characters at once drew attention to him as a novelist with a new vein. He was the laurate of fox-hunting..." During the Crimean War, he was a volunteer Major. He wrote novels until his death. "By a strange accident he met his death in the hunting field... the hero of many a stiff ride meeting his fate in galloping quietly over an ordinary ploughed field in the Vale of the White Horse. "He exerted a considerable and a wholesome influence on the manners and morals of the gilded youth of his time." This is the authentic John Peel.