UPON JOCKEYS, 239 



last race, no jockey had so many mounts. It is, however, 

 more to the purpose to repeat that a more faithful, respectful, 

 modest, trustworthy and inflexibly honest servant than Nat 

 never donned the silk jacket of a member of the Jockey Club. 

 No such rewards as those now lavished upon successful 

 jockeys fell to his share, but of the modest competency 

 bequeathed by him to his still living widow and his two 

 surviving sons, not a guinea had been earned by finessing or 

 trick. ' Evil,' says a recent writer, ' will be the day for New- 

 market when the memory of Elnathan Flatman shall cease to 

 be held in honour.' By his strict attention to business, his 

 inviolable secrecy, his honourable discharge of every duty that 

 he owed to his racing masters in public, and to his own family 

 at home, the jockey whom for thirty years Newmarket and all 

 its temptations could not beguile to do wrong, and who having 

 passed away, like Bill Scott, in his fifty-first year, now lies 

 under the shadow of All Saints' Church, well deserves to be 

 held up as a model for succeeding generations. Admirable in 

 his deft and delicate management of two-year-olds, almost 

 always the first to jump off when the flag fell in earnest, and as 

 scrupulous as John B. Day and Alfred his son in eschewing 

 the coarse and ribald phraseology which generally prevails at 

 the starting-post, Nat had also the great merit of reprobating 

 and avoiding the unsparing use of the whip, which Bill Scott, 

 Sam Rogers, Tom Aldcroft, and others, wielded with such 

 terrible effect. 



Before we endeavour to make a few comments, in conclu- 

 sion, upon the style of riding and the general character which 

 distinguish five or six of the most famous jockeys who are 

 now alive, we have a few words to say upon the widely 

 different conditions under which the business of their profes- 

 sion is now carried on when compared with those prevailing 

 half a century since. It is now all but sixty years since Mr. 

 Petre's Matilda, ridden by Eobinson, beat Mr. Gully's Mame- 

 luke, ridden by young Sam Chifney, for the St. Leger of 1827, 

 after thirty or forty false starts, which delayed the race for 



