THE POST AND THE PADDOCK. 



commencement of Singleton's triumphs on the six- 

 year-old Bay Malt on, for whom, in spite of Lord 

 Buckingham's offer to give 71bs., no competitor 

 could be found either over the Flat or the Six Mile 

 Course. Eclipse was then only an obscure three- 

 year-old, in the hands of a City meat salesman; and 

 Bay Malton had quite lost his form, when this king 

 of the chesnuts came out for his two seasons, in 1769- 

 70. The establishment of the St. Leger, Derby, and 

 Oaks in 1776-80, was coeval with the short and 

 brilliant career of Highflyer, at whose christening 

 feast Charles James Fox " assisted " with as much 

 vivacity as he did in after-years, at the house-warm- 

 ing of the banker-poet of St. James's Place. Dress, 

 gambling, politics, and horse-racing, all fought for 

 absolute dominion over as kind a heart as ever 

 beat. He was a macaroni of the first water, and not 

 only rejoiced in red-heeled shoes, but undertook a 

 journey from Lyons to Paris with the Earl of Car- 

 lisle, for the express purpose of buying waistcoats, 

 which formed their sole theme there and back. The 

 Sgavoir-Vivre Club would have been as nothing 

 without him, and he was the first to propose that 

 every man they ruined should be allowed a 50 

 annuity on condition that he never took up a dice- 

 box in it again, and thus caused the club " to play 

 against their own money." He was, too, a heavy 

 bettor, and a constant visitor at Newmarket, where 

 his portly frame was ever to be seen on his hack, 

 tearing wildly past the Judge's chair, close up with 

 the leading horses; and until the late Mr. Clark 

 defended a disputed decision by the remark that he 

 " ought by rights to have placed a tall gentleman, in 

 a white macintosh, first," Lord George Bentinck 

 keenly pursued the precedent. Colonel Hanger had 

 not long ceased to be the bully of its coffee-room, 

 about whose portals it was his wont to lounge, with 

 a ratan, which in grim playfulness, he christened 



