70 England's horses, 



shilling, or pestered to back something, or to say if the favourite 

 is ' spinning this journey.' Manifestly, the means for securing 

 large fields and large companies, heavy betting or rows of list 

 men, are the same. Handicaps and light weights have been 

 detrimental ahke to the chase and the turf; and we may date 

 this decline over a country to the time when the Liverpool 

 Grand National was transformed from an honest, fair hunting 

 country, at fair hunting weights of 12st. each, into a handicap, 

 since which time no horse carrying 12st. has ever won the 

 Grand National. On the contrary, there have often, year by 

 year, been animals, neither racehorses nor hunters, winning the 

 great cross-country event of the season at 9st. 121b., 9st. 81b., 

 9st, 61b., 9st. 101b., 9st. 71b., 9st. 101b., and 9st. 121b. Green, 

 who died only the other day, won the Grand National twice, 

 once at 9st. 121b. and again at 9st. 71b. ; and lads from the 

 racing stables, on cast-off platers, have had quite their turn 

 over Liverpool. Now it necessarily follows that light weights 

 must make light fences. A weed with a racing weight on his 

 back could never force his way through an unshorn bullfinch, 

 and so the fences have to be ' trimmed,' and the hurdles to give 

 and ' fly in every direction ' like the sham jumps at Islington, 

 so that the pumped-out daisy-cutters may be able to gallop 

 tbrough them. Elding a steeplechase over a fair hunting 

 country should be very miicli like riding to hounds ; and 

 ' Nimrod ' long since said in one of his letters that which we 

 may say again here : ' There is a description of persons who 

 are generally defeated when business is to be done, and those 

 are your very light weights. In my experience of foxhunting I 

 have observed that men above eleven stone for the most part 

 beat men under eleven stone, and for this reason : the very light 

 man says, '"Anything will carry me,'" and if he hears of a 

 slight bit of blood which no man of any size will buy because 

 he can't carry weight, he goes and purchases him. The conse- 

 quence of this is, as force must be opposed to force, the little 

 horse and his rider are knocked backwards and thrown over by 

 fences which a heavier man on a heavier horse would break 



