112 Sporting and Rural Records of the Cheveley Estate. 



Tregonwell 

 Frampton. 



The 



Mezzotinto 



Engra\ing by 



Faber. 



Saxton Hall, sensational fiction, and would have been quite forgotten and 

 absolutely overlooked but for two circumstances. 



The first is furnished in the moral, where Hawksworth says 

 he remembered the incident to be true. On this occasion, 

 according to his own account, his recollection was by no means 

 clear ; consequently we can spare his blushes and confusion for 

 asserting the horrible narrative was true without adducing any 

 authority to substantiate a legend so absurd. 



The second circumstance was attended with an engraving of 

 Mr. Frampton's portrait by Wootton, in which " The Father of the 

 Turf '' is depicted seated in an arm-chair with a stick in his right 

 hand, a greyhound at his left knee, a fighting cock on the table 

 beside him, and a picture " of the celebrated horse ' Dragon ' on the 

 wall behind him." The print was a mezzotinto engraving by 

 Faber, and was first published about the year i 740. It sold very 

 badly, and a. large number of impressions remained for years on 

 the publisher's hands. In this emergency, or slump, an enter- 

 prising print seller bought up the remainder, and under the in- 

 fluence of what may have been to him a happy inspiration, he 

 had the sensational paragraph in The Adventurer, number 37, 

 engraved and placed on the bottom of the print. But in 

 doing this the enterprising print-seller, aware of the absurdity 

 that Mr. Frampton would match his horse Dragon against another 

 for ;i^ 10,000, and on the following day match him again for 

 ;^20,ooo, very prudently altered the _^ 10,000 in the first match to 

 1000 guineas. He also faked the quotation by inserting " Mr." 

 with a dash before the words " the proprietor of the mare I had 

 distanced." At any rate this spicy quotation had the desired 

 effect. The print sold off rapidly ; it was bought by sportsmen 

 because of the absurdity of the quotation, and by folks of Hawkes- 

 worth's kidney as a deterrent to rising generations whose national 

 instinct might incline them to like horse racing and rural sports. 



The phenomenal demand which was thus created for the print 

 naturally excited the envy of competitors in that sort of business, 



