28 Saddle and Sirloin. 



purse, ready for him at any hour of the day or night. 

 The later the hour, the wilder the bet ; and it is on 

 record that they had a driving match after midnight, 

 and that Lord Kelburne lost by choosing the wrong 

 road, and nearly plunging his team among the breakers 

 off Ardrossan. 



In sturdy emphasis of speech, whether at Jockey 

 Club Cabinets, or addressing his trainer, he was the 

 same " Downright Shippon" to the last. For him the 

 Presbytery of Strathbogie had lived and laboured in 

 vain. To discuss a subject of turf polity with him 

 was about as hopeless as to ask his opinion respecting 

 the new veterinary discovery of a small supplementary 

 muscle in the eye of an ass. He once ordered a handi- 

 capper to put 7lbs. more on his own mare. When, 

 as Lord Kelburne, he hunted Ayrshire, if anything 

 went wrong with the sport, he immediately turned 

 upon the huntsman, and chased that devoted man, 

 thong in hand, half a league v over hedge and fallow. 

 Fashion and Usage could forge no fetters for him. 



Hodgson in a pair of gloves, 



Shades of Meynell and of Mytton 1 



Vainly Venus sent her doves, 

 With a pair of her own knitting, 



expressed a home truth about a Master of the Quorn, 

 which would have equally applied to the old Earl. 

 He never appeared in such modern knick-knacks as 

 knickerbockers. To the last he stood by the side of 

 the cords, with low shoes a world too wide, white 

 trousers, in which T. P. Cooke himself could have 

 conscientiously danced a hornpipe, and not unfre- 

 quently in a blue coat with gilt buttons. See him 

 when you might, there was the same nervous irrita- 

 tion, which ruined all natural rest, and made his span 

 of nearly seventy-seven years, eked out as it was 

 nightly by chloroform or laudanum, very little short 

 of miraculous. 



He was not exactly, as Aytoun said of Lord 



