244 



A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH TURF. 



the luxuriously fashionable recluse, Horace Walpole, was tempted from Strawberry 

 Hill, where he was usually wise enough to find his happiness complete, into those 

 ancient haunts at Westminster of which he could have told us so much had he cared 

 to frequent them. On that 7th of April he wrote, " the fame of Charles Fox raised 

 my curiosity and I went this day to hear him." What that fame was, entirely apart 

 from the racecourse, may be gathered from those venomous caricatures by Gilray of 

 which I have inserted one or two to complete the picture of the most versatile 



Turfite the world has ever seen. 



.__ | " Fox," continues Walpole, " made his 



motion for leave to bring in a Bill to 



correct the old Marriage Bill 



Burke made a fine and long oration 

 against the motion. . . . Charles 

 Fox, who had been running about the 

 house talking to different persons and 

 scarce listening to Burke, rose with 

 amazing spirit and memory ; answered 

 both Lord North and Burke ; ridiculed 

 the arguments of the former and con- 

 futed those of the latter 



Burke was indefatigable, learned, and 

 versed in every branch of eloquence. 

 Fox was dissipated, idle beyond 

 measure. He was that very morning 

 returned from Newmarket, where he 

 had lost some thousand pounds the 

 preceding day. He had stopped at 

 Hockerel, where he found company ; had sat up drinking all night ; and 

 had not been in bed when he came to move his Bill, which he had not even drawn 

 up. This was genius almost inspiration. The House dividing, Lord North was 

 beaten by sixty-two to sixty-one ; a disgraceful event for a Prime Minister." 

 When men who could do things like this were on the Turf, it is not surprising 

 to find that Racing benefited as much from their presence as did every other form of 

 human activity in which they took so fiery an interest, and before giving a few more 

 examples of the astonishing characters who formed the Turf Society of Eighteenth- 



