FAMOUS HORSES 59 



French winners, and Lord Lyon — unless the useful 

 mare, Placida, be counted — is memorable only as the 

 sire of Minting, one of those horses who would have 

 made a mighty name for himself but for the fact of his 

 always having to beat, or to try to beat if he was 

 asked to attempt it, one unquestionably superior 

 animal — Ormonde. 



Hermit was certainly a famous horse, though by no 

 means of the first rank. The story of his sensational 

 Derby victory in a snowstorm after he had broken a 

 blood-vessel and been stopped in his work is too 

 familiar to bear repetition. The rivalry between the 

 Marquis of Hastings and Mr, Chaplin (now and for 

 long past a sedate politician) was about this time 

 keen in the extreme, but a little romance which has 

 gained currency as to private feeling lending point to 

 the antagonism of Hermit and Lady Elizabeth is 

 altogether wide of the mark, as in 1867, when Hermit 

 won the Derby, Lady Elizabeth was a two-year-old. 

 Marksman was a colt of whom the q-reatest thinors 

 were expected in Hermit's year, and until the Duke 

 of Beaufort went to Danebury and found that John 

 Day had sorely overdone the Two Thousand Guineas 

 winner, Vauban, the prospects of the Badminton light 

 blue and white hoops had looked rosy. That Lady 

 Elizabeth, who started favourite at 7 to 4 in Blue 

 Gown's Derby {1868), had been run to pieces as a 

 two-year-old, there can be no doubt ; and though, as a 

 rule, what is past soon becomes archaic and uninter- 



