A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH TURF. 



Horace Walpole ; " I could tell you what was trumps, but that was all I heard." In 

 1765 Lord March wrote to Selwyn : "When I came home last night I found your 

 letter on my table. So you have lost a thousand pounds. ... As to your banker, I 

 will call there to-morrow." " Old Q." had his good points. Eventually Selwyn 

 gave up gambling for high stakes, but not before he had tried to fleece Wilberforce. 

 The strain upon friendship must often have been excessive. But Charles Fox went 

 through it without losing a single moment of affection. 



One interesting example of an " outside interest" is preserved in the bet which 

 Sir Charles Bunbury made with Lord Carmarthen at Brooks's, of five guineas to 



Sir Charles Bttnbury's " Eleanor'" 

 by "Whiskey." (1798.) 



five hundied, " if, on the 24th November, 1785, we are not fighting France, Spain, 

 and America, and Lord North First Lord of the Treasury." Of Sir Charles's 

 younger days there is little to say. One or two letters written to George Seiwyn 

 from Spa show merely the good-humoured young man of pleasure who liked to chaff 

 his friends. 



He raced from the time he was twenty-three, for his estate at Great Barton, near 

 Mildenhall, was within easy distance of Newmarket ; and from the day when he 

 appears as a Steward of the Jockey Club, in 1768, he became a kind of permanent 

 president of that famous institution, a position he thoroughly earned by creating 

 various records on the English Turf which can never, in the nature of things, be 



