HISTORIC JOCKEYS AND A ROYAL OWNER. 



3/7 



buttons and all, and wore nothing smarter on their legs than knickerbockers strapped 

 below the knee, with white cotton stockings, and black low shoes. A black velvet 

 cap with a long French peak and a bow of satin ribbon at the back was stuck on 

 their long hair, and round their necks they wore an ample neckcloth of white 

 cambric tied behind. The smartness of the gentlemen-riders who accompanied the 

 Prince soon helped, however, to change all this at Newmarket, Ascot, or Goodwood, 

 even if a rougher toilet still lingered on among the hardy Tykes ; and most of the 

 famous jockeys whose portraits are reproduced in this and the following chapter 

 will be found to have got very much 

 closer to modern ideals than the 

 costume just described might have 

 suggested. It was, indeed, a period 

 of transition in more ways than that 

 of dress. In the picture by Sir Joshua 

 Reynolds (opposite page 243), which 

 shows Lady Sarah Lennox (after- 

 wards Lady Bunbury) leaning out of 

 a window at Holland House, the girl 

 walking with Charles P"ox in the 

 garden is Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, 

 who ran away with O'Brien the actor 

 and lived happily ever after. For the 

 benefit of one of her nieces this lady 

 once wrote out a little memoir of what 

 she had seen that was worth re- 

 cording, and of the changes in social 

 life between 1760 and 1818. They will suggest, from a novel and refreshing stand- 

 point, a few of those alterations in the background of the Turf which must be taken 

 for granted as we approach nearer and nearer to the Victorian epoch, and few are 

 more qualified to give a hint from behind the scenes than the lady who heard 

 Charles Fox say, " C'est egal " (the phrase that lasted him to the very end; as a 

 consolation for her disappointment of the Birthday Ball when George II. died; who 

 watched Lafayette at the Opera, " going to America to fight us " ; who saw- 

 Washington and Franklin, "both of English stock, but changed by the climate"; 

 who observed that " 100,000 bibles were given to the people, and salons at the same 



Augustus. Third Earl cf Bristol . 



