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CHAPTER XV. 



FRANCIS BUCKLE AND SOME OTHER FAMOUS RIDERS. 



Eques ipso melior Bellerophonte. 



T N my thirteenth chapter (p. 338) I had occasion to describe the great match 



between Hambletonian and Diamond at Newmarket, in which Francis Buckle 



rode the winner for Sir Harry Vane-Tempest. The beaten jockey was Dennis 



Fitzpatrick, and the two were rivals for a considerable time. Another great match 

 in which the pair were pitted against each other was when Gaoler by Volunteer beat 



Orlando, .and this time Fitzpatrick won, after a race of which an eye-witness says that 

 " each finessed to get a pull till neither had a run left, and Gaoler only won by 

 staying longer than the other. The men and horses seemed screwed together and 

 so exhausted in the struggle that they appeared to be contending the race for some 

 distance after they had passed the winning post." Dennis Fitzpatrick, who made 

 his first reputation on the Curragh, and whose father was an Irish tenant of Lord 

 Clermont, rode chiefly for his lordship, for the Earl of Egremont, and for Mr. 

 Cookson. He scored a classic victory before Buckle had that honour, for he won 

 the Oaks in 1787 and on three subsequent occasions, but he never got a Leger, 

 and only one Derby, that of 1805, on Lord Egremont's Cardinal Beaufort, when his 

 English rival's fame was fairly at its zenith. He died in 1806, in his forty-second 

 year, from a cold caught after wasting. 



Buckle always spoke of Dennis with great admiration, as a master of his art, 

 putting him in the same class as the elder Chifney, who won the Oaks of 1/90, and 

 both Derby and Oaks as well in 1789. That "double event" may well constitute 

 one of the most cherished ambitions of a jockey's life, and if we omit the case of 

 Saunders on Sir Charles Bunbury's Eleanor, as we should do that of Charlton on 

 Mr. I'Anson's Blink Bonny in 1857, for the reason that the feat has not quite the 

 same value when accomplished on the same animal in each race, this achievement of 

 old Sam Chifney on the Duke of Bedford's Skyscraper and Lord Egremont's Tagg 



