1773 THE LORDS 59 



third Earl (of the first creation), grandson of the 

 famous Sir Eobert Walpole, and the ' rnad ' nephew 

 of Horace Walpole (who succeeded hirn and adopted 

 the style and title of ' uncle to the late Earl of 

 Or ford '). The third Earl succeeded to the title in 

 1751, and died in 1791, and with him, it has been 

 said, the good old English sport of ' hawking ' virtu- 

 ally expired. He is best remembered for the havoc 

 which he brought upon a fine estate, and for the sale 

 of his grandfather's splendid collection of pictures, 

 which he sold to the Empress of Eussia. How he 

 hawked, how he (and the Marquess of Eockingham) 

 raced geese (the feathered variety) at Newmarket, and 

 how he insisted upon driving red-deer instead of 

 horses, four-in-hand, and got hunted by a pack ol 

 hounds, may be read in the chronicles of sport. It is 

 not improbable that he did as much as anybody (as 

 will be shown hereafter) to bring two-year- old racing 

 (the introduction of which has been attributed, with- 

 out satisfactory proof, to Sir Charles Bunbury) into 

 fashion at Newmarket ; and it is by no means certain 

 that the fashion is a bad one. As for his madness, he 

 was * only mad nor-nor-west ' ; he not only knew a 

 'hawk' from a 'handsaw,' but ' a horse from a donkey,' 

 as the saying is. He owned and bred many excellent 

 horses : he bred, for instance, the famous Firetail (by 

 Squirrel), said (and by the Jew Apella, the late Sir 

 Francis Hastings Doyle, and the marines, but not the 

 sailors, believed) to have run the Eowley Mile at New- 



