282 A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH TURF. 



the Derby, and the Leger ; and his name was Gladiateur. On the other hand, how is 

 it that such sons as St. Galien or Robert the Devil stood alone, or that Thebais was in 

 a different class to all the rest of the family produced to Hermit by Devotion ? But 

 such instances are innumerable. If I have mentioned them at all it is to show that 

 after two hundred years we are not so very much wiser than our ancestors were in 

 the matter of breeding, and also that the point of view of a breeder in the eighteenth 

 century was very different to that with which we are but too familiar in 1902. 



Though I have taken the date of Eclipse s birth as a typical year round which 

 to group the facts of breeding dealt with in this chapter, it must not be imagined 

 that no horse worthy of note made his appearance between the date reached in my 

 last volume and the year 1764. The portraits of some famous animals, born by 1750, 

 and already described, are inserted in these pages to assist, as far as may be, in 

 comparing the various types developed. Of these earlier horses it is, of course, 

 Matchem, a bay son of Cade, his dam by Partner, who is the most distinguished, 

 not merely from the honest and successful record of his racing since he was a five- 

 year-old in 1753, but from the astonishing fact that between 1764 and 1786 he got 

 354 winners, among them Teetotum (Oaks, 1780) and Hollandaise (St Leger, 1778), 

 who scored an average of over ^6,569 a year, the highest figure reached being 

 ,25, 1 1 6 in 1772. It is worth noting that the total amount of money run for in that 

 year was ^"160,650, and that in 1787 it was only ^94,420, while in 1797 there were 

 on ly 593 horses of all ages on the Turf in all. When it is also remembered that 

 Matchem s fee, as given in my quotation from the Racing Calendar, was 25 guineas 

 in 1779, and that these sums were won at a elate when the large prizes of the modern 

 Turf did not exist, his excellence will be better appreciated if compared with the 

 ,28,567 that brought St. Simon to the top of the list in 1901. 



In Matchem occurs the first direct union of Godolphin Arabian blood with that of 

 the Byerly Turk. The first of his get that started was the Duke of Northumber- 

 land's Ccesario, winner of the Jockey Club Plate for four-year-olds at Newmarket in 

 May, 1764. Matchem had more direct Eastern blood in him than either Herod or 

 Eclipse. Like the Gower Stallion and Spanking Roger, his sire Cade was by the 

 Godolphin Arabian, but the pedigree of his dam Roxana shows two unknown elements 

 in the dam of Why Not and the daughter of Spanker ; and Partner s pedigree is 

 equally obscured by our ignorance of the dam of Makeless and the grandam of 

 Jigg. However this may be, the result was all right, both for the racer and the sire, 

 and the stablemen used to say they could tell a Matchem in the dark from the way 



