THE JOCKEY CLUB IN THE DAYS OF CHARLES JAMES FOX. 227 



all the same. These were essentially racing men in the sense that racing came first 

 in their lives. In Sir Charles's case there was little or nothing else. In Lord 

 March's there was the opera, with its Zamperini and Rena, and the rest of his 

 interesting friends. But all the same he made a very strict business of the Turf, and 

 his example alone, as that of the greatest " parti " in England, would have ensured 

 that the sport should be fashionable. With him went his friends, the set which 

 corresponded with George Selwyn and formed Horace Walpole's "out of Town" 

 party at Strawberry Hill Tony Storer, " the bon ton," and Gilly Williams. The 

 name of George Selwyn is beneath the Jockey Club Resolutions of 1767, and his 

 West Indian property and official sinecure in Barbados would have enabled him to 



By permission of Mr. Somerville Tattersatt. The Earl of Upper Ossory' s "Dorimant. ' ' 



by " Otho,'" dam by " liabrakai/i." (1772.) 



race had he cared to do so. But no horse was ever entered in his name, and he was 

 quite unable even to show a French visitor round Newmarket. He was far more 

 interested in the sight (in 1733) of the aged Madame de Q'uerouaille, Duchess of 

 Portsmouth, who preserved the memory of Stuart dissipations till she was nearly 

 ninety ; and it is certainly a thousand pities that the lively pictures of Newmarket 

 which he or Horace Walpole could have written, had they been really interested in 

 it, are not ours to read. 



There was material enough, for the Turf then, as now, was heterogeneous in its 

 elements. After the regular racing set came that brilliant company which went racing 

 because it went everywhere, and was keen about racing because it was keen about 



