xv |ii PREFACE. 



which lives upon Turf speculations without caring in the least for the best Turf 

 interests. The artificiality which prevails in so many other branches of sport is 

 present here as well. Squire Osbaldeston may once have shot partridges for 

 money ; but his friends would have looked with much greater surprise on the 

 excessive game preservation of the present day, and on the astonishing value 

 necessarily set upon such sporting assets as the right to shoot a covert or to fish a 

 trout stream ever since every enthusiastic follower of Izaak Walton has been easily 

 able to afford a trip of a hundred miles or so by rail to get to the water he has 

 rented. In a lesser degree the same effects are observable in hunting. 



During the last few decades, also, the number of recreations from which a 

 comparatively healthy man can choose have enormously increased. In these 

 scientific days of arsenic and glucose, George Borrow would have had more than 

 the loss of his beloved " old ale" to deplore. But if prize-fighting has degenerated 

 into " pugilistic contests with the gloves," cricket has only improved on its 

 inheritance, and, in spite of many baleful efforts of the statistician and the record- 

 maker, I believe a big English crowd is just as keen on the best points ot the game 

 to-day as ever were its ancestors. The excesses of football will fortunately work out 

 their own decay. When a " game " has got under the control of limited liability 

 companies whose only care is to secure a big gate, it is not very far from radical 

 reform. Lawn tennis, bicycling, and golf, have all had their turn of popular favour, 

 and are each testing their true value by their respective powers of defying or 

 outlasting criticism. Throughout them all the bane of preferring results to methods 

 has worked its peculiar evil. It could not be expected that the Turf should alone 

 remain scatheless, nor has it clone so. But in spite of every harmful symptom I 

 believe the Turf will have a longer life than any of its rivals. Without going so far 

 as the hero of one of our latest " problem -plays," who asked " Where would England 

 be without her love for horses ? " I will at least observe that if we eliminated all the 

 doings of our most successful owners from the story of their native land, our annals 

 would be far less splendid than they are ; the Navy would have been poorer ; the 

 Army would have lost some of the most brilliant of its officers ; the highest position 

 that a subject can hold would not have been graced by more than one Prime 

 Minister; the throne itself would have been deprived of more than one monarch of 

 these realms. 



His Majesty King Edward VII. will always retain a very high place among 

 royal patrons of the Turf. The calamity that fell upon him and upon the whole 



