HISTORIC JOCKEYS AND A ROYAL OWNER 



375 



Then came Mr. F. Hartigan, Mr. H. Nugent, and Captain Bewicke. Across country 

 the late H. S. Sidney again did best with Messrs. Harper and Wood close up. 



When a certain literary foreigner visited Epsom in 1800 (as Henri Taine did 

 seventy-five years later) he recorded his impression that Englishmen cared for nothing 

 so much as horse-racing and cock-fighting, for their inns and houses were lined with 

 pictures of both sports. He thought some of the noble riders whose names have 

 been just mentioned ran a risk of being " deprived of respiration by the velocity of 

 their motion" ; and he would no doubt have been equally surprised had he observed 

 the velocity with which many of them 

 passed the bottle as they drank the 

 cabalistic toast of " Cardinal Puff" (at 

 the intricacies of which the Duke of 

 York excelled) after their day's sport 

 was over. Writing before our own 

 War Office had deliberately encouraged 

 English soldiers to enter for a road- 

 race from Brussels to Ostend, the 

 French visitor of 1800 comments on 

 our national kindness to animals, and 

 is full of admiration for the buck of 

 the period trotting out of town on his 

 neat crop-tailed tit, in a green riding 

 frock and plate buttons, cordovan 

 boots and a round hat. If he had 

 been able to understand contemporary 

 Turf arguments he would have learnt 

 that Sir Charles Bunbury's advocacy of two-year-old racing was considered by many 

 cognoscenti in 1801 to be ruining the breed, and he might even have heard some old- 

 fashioned supporter of the ancient days quoting from the "Sporting Magazine' 1 of a few 

 years previously to the effect that " the present dreary gloom of camps, campaigns, and 

 national disquietude, joined to the sterility of adventure, a palpable pecuniary scarcity, 

 and the transpiration of sporting integrity had produced a most unpromising prospect of 

 Turf achievements." Yet it would have been hard for him to believe that the Turf was 

 going to the dogs (as it has always been doing from the beginning until now, if the 

 pessimists are to be believed) if he had been taken to the gay assemblage on the new 



Charles, Fourth Duke of Richmond. 



