Tier f History. n 



his fame as one of the best gentleman-riders of the 

 day, by his perpetual matches with Mr. Buncombe. 

 " Brown-and-black cap first" was the Judge's report 

 in the Second Spring of 1757, when he rode a match 

 against the Duke of Hamilton ; but he could not 

 draw his weight to half-a-pound, and was disqualified 

 accordingly. It is difficult to conceive how one who 

 always " set-to" so well, conformed so readily to his 

 flippant era, and could, when he was only forty-two, 

 be found writing to George Selwyn at Paris, and 

 assuring him that " I like the muff you have sent me 

 much better than if it had been tigre, or any other 

 glaring colour." Muff or no muff, he stood manfully 

 by his brother-sportsman in the Regency business, 

 and lost his office as Groom of the Bedchamber in 

 consequence a slight for which a man with so many 

 friends cared but little. He scarcely missed one 

 York Meeting for half a century, and did not wholly 

 quit the turf for his bow-window in Piccadilly (where 

 Lord Campbell, when a law student, used to behold 

 him with awe), till he was verging on eighty, having 

 then owned race-horses for about sixty years ; and he 

 now rests not many paces from Tom Durfey, and 

 Beau BrummeH's poor relations, in a vault beneath 

 the communion-table of St. James's Church. 



The North was the Marquis of Buckingham's 

 especial battle-ground ; and in 1759 his chestnut, 

 Whistlejacket (J. Singleton), defeated Brutus in a 

 2000 guineas match over four miles, at York. Another 

 seven years' cycle brings us to the death of Brutus's 

 jockey, Thomas Jackson, who was (as his tombstone 

 remarks) " bred up at Black Hambleton, and crowned 

 with glory at Newmarket ;" and the commencement 

 of Singleton's triumphs on the six-year-old Bay 

 Malton, for whom, in spite of Lord Rockingham's 

 offer to give 7lbs., 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 



