HISTORY OF HORSE-RACING. 27 



publication, as cruelty was no part of the old gentleman's char- 

 acter.' 



Thus far my respectable correspondent, whose opinion simply, 

 situated and connected as he is, must have considerable weight. 

 Sir Charles Bunbury also assured me that he was inclined to 

 suspect the old anecdote of Mr. Frampton as a fabrication. There 

 is at present no other authority for it, public or private, of which I 

 am aware, than No. 37 of the 'Adventurer,' and Dr. Hawkesworth, 

 in all probability, received it, as we do at this day, merely upon 

 public tradition. . . . 



Farther, it may be fair to suspect that the cruel anecdote of the 

 Father of the Turf and his horse Dragon is a pious fraud, invented 

 by those who might think it a great merit in a religious way to 

 cast a slander that would stick well upon the unholy exercise of 

 horse-racing. On the per contra side (for I love to reason in all 

 cases arithmetically, and whenever I suspect the omission of a 

 fraction on either side I am never satisfied with the truth of my 

 account) thus much may and ought to be said : the anecdote, how- 

 ever barbarous, is strictly probable, and may be matched in too 

 great a number of melancholy instances. 



The object in view was a very large sum of money, and perhaps 

 the moral dialectics of the day differed not very greatly from that 

 of a later period, in which present profit is supposed to constitute 

 the essence of justice to ourselves and that ourselves are our 

 nearest relatives. I really cannot conceive but that some such act 

 perpetrated must have been the ground of that universal tradition, 

 whether or not the person named was the perpetrator. 



Tregonwell Frampton, keeper of the running-horses at New- 

 market to William III., Queen Anne, Georges I. and II., died in 

 the year 1727, aged 86 ; he might, therefore, have been a pro- 

 prietor of racers in the reign of Charles II. ; and the famous 

 Dragon, who precedes our oldest racing annals, and of whom we 

 know nothing but by oral tradition, may have flourished about 

 that time. . . . 



The opinion of all the eminent veterinary surgeons we 

 have consulted is in favour of the possibility of a horse being 

 able to run a race immediately after castration ; and from the 

 frequent occurrence of acts of cruelty to horses and other 

 animals at the period in which Mr. Frampton lived, we think 

 it highly probable that such a race may have taken place. 



