A CURIOUS RACE. 43 



run. At the news of her Majesty's death the sports were at 

 once abandoned. The nobility and gentry left the course, and 

 attended the Lord Mayor of York and Archbishop Dane, who 

 proclaimed his Majesty King George I. After this ceremony 

 was over most of the nobility set off for London. It was, as 

 we have said, a serious event to most of them, for they knew 

 how keenly the Jacobites had been plotting, and there could be 

 little doubt that before many weeks had passed they would have 

 to be defending their new king and their own estates and heads 

 from a Jacobite invasion. Never, therefore, we may be sure, 

 was a race-meeting broken up under more momentous and 

 agitating circumstances than the York Summer Meeting of 

 1714. 



But there was one other noteworthy incident about that 

 York meeting which deserves to be chronicled. Though the 

 noble sportsmen were probably not aware of it, there was ' a 

 chiel amang them takin' notes' — and ' faith he printed them.' 

 This is his description of what he saw among the nobility and 

 gentry at York races : ' They were all so intent, so eager, so 

 busy upon the sharping part of the sport, their wages and bets, 

 that to me they seemed just as so many horse-coursers in Smith- 

 field, descending, the greatest of them, from their high dignity 

 and quality, to the picking one another's pockets, and biting one 

 another as much as possible, and that with so much eagerness 

 as it might be said they acted without respect to faith, honour, 

 or good manners,' Let us hope the expression 'picking one 

 another's pockets' is only to be understood as a figure of speech ; 

 but in any case, that picture of the aristocratic sportsmen of 

 1 7 14 is not a very creditable one, and does not say much 

 for the morals of the Turf when George I. was king. And 

 yet there are people who would have us believe that the said 

 morals of the Turf have deteriorated — to which we answer 

 ' Bosh !' 



