The Great Races. 89 



famous horse, Orlando, sire of many good race-horses, hunters, and hacks, whose portrait we 

 gave at page (ij. Some curious people dug up the body of Leander, to look at his mouth, 

 but found his lower jaw had been removed. 



It was given in evidence before a committee of the House of Lords, in 1844, that besides 

 Running Rein and Leander, a horse called Maccabaeus — really Goneway, and a mare called Julia, 

 all entered as three-year-olds, were four-year-olds, and a horse, called Bloodstone, entered as a two- 

 year old, was a three-year-old. Since that date the marks of age shown by a horse's teeth 

 have become familiar to every groom. 



Every foreigner who visits England, and every Englishman, whether he cares for racing or 

 not, should see the Derby once, and watch the sights and sounds of two hundred and fifty thousand 

 people wrapped for a minute in intense excitement. That a quarter of a million, including all 

 the ruffianism that London and every racecourse in the kingdom can produce, should assemble 

 and disperse in so orderly a manner, with so little police restraint, is not the least curious part of 

 the day, and a strong tribute to the law-abiding character of the population. In any other 

 European country an army of infantry, cavalry, and artillery would be called out to keep the 

 peace. 



The picturesqueness of the "road" has departed with the advance of the railroad to the race- 

 course, and a lady — at any rate, a young lady — can only see the Derby, removed from the 

 disgusting scenes and language of the "hill," and with comfort to her friends, in one of the 

 private boxes into which the grand stand has been divided, to the destruction of all that was 

 sociable and pleasant about the Derby in 1848, when Surplice won. 



Ascot Heath still preserves a share of its ancient glories, still retains its royal pageant, 

 a procession of the Master of the Buckhounds, with the huntsman and yeoman prickers in full 

 uniform, the arrival of the revived four-horse coaching clubs, and a display of rank and beauty 

 in gorgeous array on the grand stand lawn which made an enthusiastic American, familiar 

 with Paris, exclaim that it was alone worth the voyage across the Atlantic. 



But to see racing divested of all its coarse and disgusting accessaries — the degraded mob, the 

 blasphemous, greedy, obscene Bohemianism that riots on Epsom Downs — a visit must be paid 

 to Goodwood Park, where the privileged enclosure and the police exclude nearly all that the 

 most fastidious would desire to exclude; and affords on a golden afternoon of August, with 

 its smooth turf, ancestral trees, and picturesque shrubberies, peopled with manly men and 

 lovely women, scenes that Watteau never equalled in picturesqueness and colour. Nothing has 

 been seen like it, even at the most elaborate fttes of the Courts of Europe in their most 

 magnificent days — not even at Fontainebleau, under the last Emperor of the French; for at 

 Goodwood the races give a pleasing excitement to the scene ; they are an accessary to a 

 gorgeous picnic. You need not, unless you choose, even listen to the hoarse roar of the betting- 

 ring beneath the grand stand. 



The Doncaster St. Leger affords an opportunity of seeing a Yorkshire crowd, the very 

 opposite of a Derby-day mob, for in Yorkshire every man, down to the humblest, is familiar with 

 the pedigree and performances of all the favourites at least, and carries in his head a history of 

 racing, and particularly of St. Legers, that would puzzle a Civil Service Examining Commissioner. 

 In a word, the Doncaster St. Leger is run in the presence of a crowd of critical experts, 

 amongst whom the racehorse is the object of as serious worship as the cat, the ox, or the 

 crocodile, was to the ancient Egyptians. 



Newmarket races are supposed to be conducted on severely practical principles. The mere 

 pleasure-seeker has no business there ; the regular frequenters mean business, and nothing else. 

 M 



