14 THE JOCKEY CLUB 1750- 



Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son [? godson], 

 instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a 

 polite education.' It was the period during which 

 Horace Walpole wrote that ' a quarter of our peeresses 

 will soon have been the wives of half of our living peers,' 

 and during which (as we know from the same Horace 

 Walpole, who tells the sad story of the suicide of Sir 

 John Bland, the Yorkshire baronet, in consequence of 

 losses by gambling, and from many other sources, 

 such as the * betting-book ' at Brookes's and elsewhere) 

 the * bloods ' laid heavy wagers about anything in 

 heaven or earth or the waters under the earth (and 

 down the window-pane), and outrageous gaming was 

 the order of the day, but scrupulousness was not. 

 Eead, too, what ' Gilly ' Williams wrote, in 1768, to 

 George Selwyn about one of the most conspicuous 

 and, for a time, the most successful, among the early 

 members of the Jockey Club : ' What a turbulent life 

 does that wicked boy [Lord Bolingbroke, familiarly 

 called " Bully "] lead with profligates and rogues of 

 all descriptions.' Eead, moreover, the pretty sketch 

 (to be given more fully hereafter) drawn so ingenuously 

 by Lady Sarah Bunbury (in a letter to the aforesaid 

 George Selwyn), of noble and gentle members of the 

 Jockey Club ' playing cards in the morning at the coffee- 

 house,' and being denounced (falsely, no doubt) as 

 ' cheats ' by somebody who was standing by and betting 

 on the play. Altogether the candid mind will reject as 

 absurd the modern notion (which is so often made the 



