JOHN GULLY. 81 



in the ascendant, for he then won with Uglj Buck, of which he was 

 half proprietor, the Two Thousand, and also ran fourth with him 

 for the Derby. In the following year he was formidable with 

 Weatherbit and Old England, and in 1846 won the Derby with 

 Pyrrhus the P^irst, and the Oaks with Mendicant, an exploit which 

 had only once been accomplished before, when Sir Charles Bun- 

 bury's Eleanor carried off both trophies. The victory of Pyrrhus 

 must have been a bitter pill for old John Day, who had purchased 

 him at Doncaster as a yearling, Mr. Gully agreeing to go halves 

 with him. The horse never ran as a two-year-old, and John Day, 

 being in want of money, valued his share of Pyrrhus at the end of 

 the year, at £100, which Mr. Gully promptly gave him. Mendi- 

 cant, the winner of the Oaks, was not a particularly good money- 

 getting mare for her owner, as Lord George Bentinck and the 

 public had taken such a violent fancy for her that the odds Gully 

 could obtain were very small. In the Ascot week of that year 

 Mendicant was sold to Sir Joseph Hawley for 4,000 guineas. But 

 she ran nowhere in the Cup, and Sir Joseph's friends condoled with 

 him on what seemed to be a dead loss, whereas in reality she was 

 destined to prove a " gold mine," for ten years afterwards she 

 brought her owner £80,000 through her famous son. Beadsman. But 

 we need not dilate further upon Mr. Gully's tmf successes. We 

 have given sufficient details to establish his claim to be ranked 

 among famous racing men ; we have placed before the reader, as 

 succinctly as possible, the leading incidents in his strange and 

 chequered career ; and we cannot more fitly close this sketch than 

 with the following interesting passage from the pen of a sportsman 

 who was a friend and contemporary of Gully's: — "It was the late 

 Mr. Buckland, who, when on a visit to Lord Fitzwilliam, told me of 

 the impression made on him by the appearance of a fine handsome 

 gentleman coming up the staircase with a beautiful girl in green 

 velvet on either arm — the member for Pontefract, with his two 

 daughters. Poor ' Sylvanus,' too, thus portrayed Mr. Gully in 

 the very zenith of his career : — ' He had permanent lodgings at 

 Newmarket, well and tastily furnished, and dispensed his hospitality 

 to his friends with no sparing hand. An excellent cook, claret from 

 Griffiths's, with an entertaining gentleman-like host, left but little 

 to be desired at the dinner awaiting us. Mr. Gully is justly esteemed, 

 having raised himself from the lowest paths of life not merely to a 

 position of wealth, but to that intimacy amongst gentlemen on or 

 off the turf, but still gentlemen in taste, which nought but the 

 undeviating good manners, and entertaining, unpresuming deport^ 

 ment of Gully could for a moment, or rather for any length of time 

 beyond a moment, suffer them to tolerate. No man ever possessed 

 these qualifications, gained through innate acuteness, great common 

 sense and a plastic disposition to observe and benefit by the chance 

 rencontres with the courtly patrons of his day, to a greater degree, 

 taking the early disadvantages he had to contend with into 



