238 GAINS IN 1844 AND 1845. 



shipping interests all together feel intolerable dis- 

 tress, we shall do no good ; but in my conscience 

 I believe if the Navigation Laws are repealed, 

 which I scarcely doubt, this will happen within 

 tAvo years. — Always yours most sincerely, 



" G. Bentinck." 



It will not seem surprising to those who read 

 this and other letters, addressed about the same 

 time by Lord George to Mr Croker, that his Lord- 

 ship should have found it impossible to conduct 

 such a correspondence, to work for fifteen or six- 

 teen hours a-day, and simultaneously to manage 

 a stud comprising altogether more than two hun- 

 dred head of thoroughbred horses. Long before 

 the sale " of everything, from little Kitchener to 

 old Bay Middleton," I saw plainly what was about 

 to happen. For the present, it only remains for 

 me to conclude this chapter by stating that, stim- 

 ulated by his great success in 1845, his Lordship 

 engaged his brood-mares in Produce Stakes, and 

 his yearlings and foals at the end of that year, 

 to an extent which has, I believe, never been 

 equalled in the history of the Turf by a single 

 individual. He began by entering eighteen colts 

 in the Derby and eight fillies in the Oaks. Five 

 yearlings or foals he entered in Two Hundred 

 Sovereigns and Three Hundred Sovereigns Stakes 

 p. p. ; seventeen brood-mares in Produce Stakes 

 of one hundred sovereigns each. When I ap- 



