1 2 The Post and the Paddock. 



City meat salesman ; and Bay Malton had quite lost 

 his form, when this king of the chestnuts came out for 

 his two seasons, 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-warming 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 Carlisle, 

 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 5O/. 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 better, 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 

 "THE INFANT," when Sam Chifney, senior, took his 

 rank among the first jockeys of the day. Sam wot 

 as little as they did, when he saw a pale, sharp- 

 featured stable lad of Mr. Vernon's try his weight 

 (3st. I3lbs.) for Wolf, in the May of 1783, that he was 

 the Frank Buckle for whom Fate destined " all the 

 good things at Newmarket" and elsewhere during the 



