444 



A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH TURF. 



entered the Prince of Wales's Own he made his mark in many different directions. 

 He was a fine whip and a splendid rider across country. Tom Cribb thought that 

 when trained he was the best man of his weight in the ring. As a handicapper of 

 horses he was unsurpassed, and it was, therefore, very appropriate that it was 

 Colonel Mellish's Eagle (by Volunteer) which first inspired in his great successor, 

 Admiral Rous, that passion for the thoroughbred which ended only with his death 

 in 1877. He went out to the Peninsula as aide-de-camp to Sir Rowland Ferguson, 

 and was recognised by a general as having been " in the cockpit at York " only a 

 month before. For all that, he was given the imperishable reputation of having 



proved himself " one of 

 the best officers in the 

 Service," by no less a 

 personage than the 

 Duke of Wellington 

 himself. That race 

 with Pavilion was for 

 three thousand guineas 

 a side, at Lewes, over 

 a four-mile course, and 

 so heavily was Mellish 

 engaged that he went 

 up to the Regent's 

 carriage on the course 

 and merrily asked, 

 " Which of you will 



engage me for his coachman if I am beaten ? " But he was worth a hundred 

 Sir John Lades. After losing all his own money he married well enough to 

 settle down quietly on a farm at Hodsack Priory, not far from the Yorkshire 

 acres that had once been his. But he died before he was forty-five, and the table on 



J 



which he played Hazard with the Prince on that last night at Blyth is preserved at 

 Doncaster to this day. There is probably only one other piece of furniture that has 

 seen such games, and that is at St. Anne's Hill, Chertsey, where you may still 

 wander in the rooms where Charles James Fox was just as happy when he lost as 

 when he won. 



The name of Mellish is one of the most romantic memories in a race that, to my 



Col. Mellish's ' Stavelcy" 1 (1802) by " Shuttle." 



