BLOOD SIRES. 205 



palm for the best modern union of speed, bottom, and 

 weight-carrying power. His make was a brilliant 

 exception to conventional racing rules, as lie was a 

 small short horse, in fact quite of the Suffolk Punch 

 order, in his two-year-old season low in the withers, 

 straight in the shoulders, short, and upright in the 

 pasterns, small footed, calf-kneed, and only sixty- 

 three inches in the girth when he won the Derby. 

 With all these so-called racing defects, he looked a 

 race-horse every inch of him. His head and neck 

 were especially game and blood-like ; but the great 

 secret of his rare racing power lay in his high mus- 

 cular loins, which sent him along the flat and up the 

 hill like a hare. It was glorious to see Wells let 

 Virago go at the Stand for the Great Metropolitan, 

 but it was nothing to the style in which the little 

 chesnut answered to the whip when " Job," with 

 whip and heel, called on him to collar Kingston, who 

 was then in his prime, for the Doncaster Cup, or the 

 almost electric burst of speed with which he darted on 

 to Stockwell, and then swerving from desperate dis- 

 tress while giving 91bs. to a horse half as powerful 

 again up the Ascot Hill, came a second time, and 

 beat him a head on the post. Some how or other, 

 when we see a horse strike well out with the off hind 

 leg, \ve always fancy that he means going, and this 

 peculiarity was an especial characteristic of Tedding- 

 ton and Rifleman. 



It is a common excuse for horses of no great run- 

 ning powers, that they have failed in the stud simply 

 for the lack of having picked mares put to them. 

 Merit will, however, be generally served in this, as 

 in everything else ; and glancing over a twenty years' 

 list of great winners, we do not recognise more than 

 thirty of them as high-class stud names. Perhaps 

 the most distinguished cluster of future stud cracks 

 came to the fore in the Derby of 1836, when Gla- 

 diator, Venison, and Slane finished behind Bay 



