1773 THE SIRS 77 



we know that it was at York in 1788 that a condemn - 

 able novelty was introduced, when a notorious match 

 was run between a horse and a mare carrying thirty 

 stone each. We know, besides, that Sir Charles 

 Bunbury attended York races when he was a very 

 young man (for he purchased Dux at York in 1766, 

 when he was only twenty-six), where he would cer- 

 tainly meet both the Rev. H. Goodricke and Mr. John 

 Hutchinson, both older than he (one a little and the 

 other a great deal), and more experienced in horse- 

 flesh (for Hutchinson, the junior of the pair, already 

 had charge of the famous Miss Western in 1751, when 

 he was but fifteen, and when Sir Charles was but 

 eleven), and he would rather have learned a ' wrinkle * 

 from them than have been able to show them any- 

 thing. On the whole, then, even if Sir Charles did 

 introduce two-year-old racing at Newmarket, and 

 though in Mr. Orton's own 'Annals' (of York and 

 Doncaster) the earliest instance recorded of such 

 racing in public is the epigrammatic match between 

 Sir W. Vavasour's Hope and Sir C. Turner's Despair, 

 at Doncaster in 1790, there is some reason to believe 

 that Mr. Orton's statement as to the origin of two- 

 year-old racing is correct that it originated in a 

 private match between two noted horse-breeders in 

 the North, and that it was imported (whether by Sir 

 Charles Bunbury or by somebody else) from the North 

 to the South. For there is no evidence, so far as 

 diligent search can discover, that either the Rev. 



