TURF HISTORY. SJ. 



of Buckingham, who won the first St. Leger; the 

 cry of the Corporation harriers began to be heard in 

 the land, and their merry proprietors rode stoutly at 

 their sterns, or " ate in dreams the custards of the 

 day," till they found themselves saddled with a debt 

 of 99,700. Their estate at Rossington, whose 

 partridge and pheasant preserves had year after year 

 been laid under contribution for the Mansion House 

 kitchen-range, which was rarely allowed to cool, 

 fetched nearly that sum at the hammer ; and their 

 less toothsome and more business-like successors 

 have turned these sporting propensities to better 

 account, and make an annual seven or eight per 

 cent, out of a 25,000 race-course outlay. 



Although its general history is wrapped in much 

 obscurity, the turf had made no small advance when 

 one Reginald Heber published the first number of 

 the Racing Calendar, in 1751. The preface, which 

 is in itself a literary curiosity, announces <: the sacred 

 estimation" in which the publisher holds " my muni- 

 ficent and voluntary subscribers"; and, further, pro- 

 mises the most lucid details of cocking matches, 

 <l where and who were the looser s of them." The 

 races in Hyde Park had long been done away. Sir 

 Phillip Neil, and his four Flemish mares, which were 

 fed with Rhenish wine and cheese-cakes on one of 

 those gala-days, were forgotten. Snipes, unconscious 

 of General Oglethorpe's fowling-piece, were still 

 drinking in the marshes on the present site of Con- 

 duit-street. Wild fowl were almost tempted to linger 

 at evening among the bulrushes of the willow-walk 

 ofPimlico. Islington still gloried in its mineral 

 water and its custards. Roystering benchers had 

 ceased to lose dice between the boards of the Middle 

 Temple floor > and Mrs. Hudson, of Covent Garden, 

 had not yet devised her " stabling for one hundred 

 noblemen and their horses." The apprentice lads 

 chased ducks on the Moor-le-field ponds all Sunday 



