SOME EARLY VICTORIAN OWNERS. 



whom he had reluctantly bought from Lord Jersey. Probably no man ever 

 believed so many "straight tips," and made so little out of them. Even of the 

 results of his trials he was always a little uncertain, and generally disagreed with his 

 confederate. But when Greville, who did not invariably do quite the right thing by 

 his friends, made any particularly glaring error, it was always George Payne who 

 made it up. There has been something pathetic to me in Greville's descriptions of 

 a pursuit for which he was never fitted and in which he persistently indulged. " My 

 campaign on the Turf," writes the suspiciously introspective secretary, " has been a 

 successful one. Still all this success 

 has not prevented frequent disgust, 

 and I derive anything but unmixed 

 pleasure from this pursuit even when 

 1 win by it. Besides the continual 

 disappointments and difficulties inci- 

 dent to it, which harass the mind, 

 the life it compels me to lead, the 

 intimates arising out of it, the asso- 

 ciates and the war against villany and 

 trickery, being haunted by continual 

 suspicions, discovering the trust-un- 

 worthiness of one's most intimate 

 friends, the necessity of insincerity 

 and concealment sometimes where 

 one feels that one ought and would 

 desire to be most open ; then the 

 degrading nature of the occupation, 

 mixing with the lowest of mankind, 

 and absorbed in the business for the sole purpose of getting money, the conscious- 

 ness of a sort of degradation of intellect, the conviction of the deteriorating 

 effects upon both the feelings and the understanding which are produced, the sort 

 of dram-drinking excitement of it all these things and these thoughts torment 

 me and often turn my pleasure to pain." 



A man who thought all this about racing would have earned greater respect 

 from me had he given it up ; and it is positively refreshing afterwards to hear 

 George Payne's good-humoured self-depreciation, and his cheery criticisms of a 



Henry, Seventh Dttke of Beaufort. 



