33o THE DUKE OF CLEVELAND. 



with him at a disadvantage. A simple recital of the 

 particulars of the transactions I had with him will 

 best show whether or not I came the worse off of 

 the two in these dealings, which, so far as his lord- 

 ship was concerned, were always carried out with 

 scrupulous exactitude. 



But first I may observe that whatever may have 

 been Lord William's tendency to free expenditure on 

 bis personal pleasures, he was not, so far as I am 

 aware, given to extravagance of any kind in connection 

 with his stables, although he was not, as will be seen, 

 unwilling to pay a fair price for a good horse. To 

 his jockeys, at all events, he paid only the regulation 

 fee. In so doing he may have acted with the laud- 

 able desire of giving offence to no one ; feeling that 

 if he did otherwise, he would of a certainty offend 

 many without satisfying the recipients of his bounty ; 

 like Louis XIV., in fact, who in restricting his 

 liberality defended the action by saying, ' When I 

 give away a place, I make a hundred discontented and 

 one ungrateful.' Nevertheless, in the matter of gifts, 

 we may, as I have had reason to show more than 

 once, have worse examples set our aristocracy in the 

 treatment of their jockeys than those handed down to 

 us by the noble lord. 



The very fact, as shown in this case, of his 

 care not to open his purse-strings too wide in 

 the rewards given to those who rode for him, 



