SIXTY YEARS ON THE TURF 



abatement of the invasion ; rather, the reverse is 

 threatened. In truth, to judge by American com- 

 munications the United States will soon be denuded 

 of its leading professionals, the oiFers emanating from 

 English owners being of irresistible character. That 

 there are here and there still English owners firm 

 believers in the old school must be allowed. But 

 the great trend of opinion runs solid for the Yankees 

 when they preserve the proprieties, and only his 

 folly in pursuing practices he must have known the 

 Turf authorities could not tolerate has caused the 

 absence of Sloan from the saddle in England. If 

 the present state of affairs is satisfactory to the 

 English division, then indeed are they easy to 

 please. 



" We yet retain 

 Some small pre-eminence. We justly boast 

 At least superior jockeyship, and claim 

 The honours of the Turf as all our own." 



This may have been true at the moment when 

 the poet Cowper designed the preceding lines. But 

 it is so far from the fact at the present as to cause 

 the quotation to carry a quaintness never anticipated 

 by the author. Superior jockeyship, if not all the 

 honours of the Turf, were in very truth our own when, 

 say, in 1857 we saw the American Tankerley taken off 

 Prioress (after she had dead-heated with El Hakim 



