UPON TRAINERS. 199 



was a consummate judge of hounds and horses, and of every- 

 thing connected with what Mr. Delme Radcliffe calls ' the noble 

 science of fox-hunting.' Mr. Charles James Apperley's or 

 'Nimrod's' books, such as ' Remarks on the Condition of Hun- 

 ters, the Choice of Horses and their Management ' (London, 

 1831); ' Northern Tours, a Description of the principal Hunts 

 in Scotland and the North of England' (London, 1838); 'The 

 Life of a Sportsman' (London, 1842), possess a value from which 

 time can subtract little : but they have reference solely to the 

 hunting-field. ' Nimrod ' was also a fairly good coachman and 

 judge of driving, and had at any rate a long and practical ac- 

 quaintance with the mails and stage-coaches running upon the 

 great high roads which led to London. But when it came to 

 writing about horse-racing, he had to acquire most of his infor- 

 mation at second-hand. As a gentleman jockey he occasionally 

 put in a not discreditable appearance at Hunt meetings, but the 

 frequenters of Newmarket hardly knew him by sight, and he 

 had at best but scanty knowledge of the pedigrees and perform- 

 ances of famous racehorses. The results of his unfamiliarity 

 with the Turf may be seen in swarms of inaccuracies which 

 deface the third and least valuable of his ' Quarterly Review ' 

 essays. To begin with, it owes many of its best passages 

 to acknowledged and unacknowledged plagiarisms. In addi- 

 tion to long quotations from ' Holcroft's Memoirs,' for which 

 credit is given to that jockey-dramatist, 'Nimrod' borrowed 

 largely from Taplin's ' Sporting Dictionary,' published in 1803, 

 while his sketch of Colonel Mellish, said by ' The Druid ' to be 

 the best thing in his Turf essay, was mainly taken from one of 

 Pierce Egan's books. Perhaps, however, the most ridiculous 

 of ' Nimrod's ' many mistakes will be found in the following 

 passage : 



After quitting Newmarket, his late Majesty (George IV.) was a 

 great supporter of country races, sending his horses to run heats for 

 plates ; and he particularly patronised the meetings at Brighton 

 and Lewes, which acquired high repute. But Bibury was his 

 favourite raceground, where, divesting himself of the shackles of 



