DANEBURY AND LORD GEORGE BENTINCK 



Not long after Crucifix's success in the Oaks^ 

 Bentinck severed his connexion with Danebury. 

 He became dissatisfied with the Days,* and trans- 

 ferred his horses to the care of John Kent at 

 Goodwood, a trainer who made his master his 

 hero, and who has left more than one interesting 

 reminiscence of their connexion. 



Bentinck's life is not an easy one to review or 

 to estimate. As Greville says, it was one in which 

 opposite motives and feelings were strangely inter- 

 mingled. His record in political history, of course, 

 depends upon Disraeli's brilliant monograph ; but 

 Greville, though deeply prejudiced, knew his cousin 

 better than the politician, and, at all events, may 

 be taken as a superior authority upon those quaUties 

 which engaged him in the sovereign passion. 

 Bentinck, however, defined his own character in 

 a sentence he uttered to Disraeli a few months 

 before he died. " I don't pretend," he said, " to 

 know much, but I can judge of men and horses " ; 

 and indeed this was true. Strenuous and irascible 

 — the epithets are those of Disraeli, his sympathetic 

 biographer — he worked at the problems of the 

 Turf with the same energy as he afterwards dis- 

 played in the House of Commons when he was 

 called — as he might well have been called in these 

 days — to the aid of an acephalous and helpless 

 political group. He had no claims to cultivation 

 or to polite learning. He could have taken na 

 part in conversation with Fox and Windham at 



' Although Bentinck ceased to employ Day as his trainer irt 

 1 84 1, it appears from the report of a qui tarn action at Guildford 

 Assizes in 1844 that he won ;^3,ooo from his quondam servant in. 

 a bet. 



75 



