THE NEW SCHOOL 51 



grace the proceedings with his presence. When George IV.'s 

 wardrobe was sold after his death, everybody was sur- 

 prised at its variety and profusion. It was the history of 

 dress for the last fifty years in this country, and an 

 edition de luxe of the orders and Court costumes of every 

 Court in Europe. Whips and canes alone amounted to 

 several hundreds, and Mr. Greville, who was on most 

 confidential terms with the king's valet Batchelor, especially 

 notices a dozen brand-new pairs of corduroy riding 

 breeches which he had ordered to hunt in with Dom Miguel. 

 It was said that the time Louis XV. devoted to elaborating 

 statistics and returns of his stables and kennels would have 

 sufficed to post him up in the interior economy of his army ; 

 and George IV. appears to have spared himself as little when 

 clothes were concerned. Baron Gronow tells us in his 

 Memoirs of the hours of meditative agony which the Prince 

 of Wales dedicated to the fashions of the day, and up to the 

 last, as his pages lamented, he had a very wicked memory 

 for clothes, and often upset them by asking to look at a 

 coat which neither he nor they had seen for years. At the 

 time of Dom Miguel's visit, however, he had become 

 much too heavy to think of hunting ; indeed, owing to his 

 great weight and swelled legs, he had not hunted for a long- 

 time ; so the order can only have been given from a sense of 

 the eternal fitness of things, and by way of a tribute to the 

 days when he lived at Kempshot and rode his dear Curricle,' 



' ' Curricle,' according to the inscription on Lhe back of the picture from 

 which the illustration is taken, was a brown horse ' got by Trentham out of 

 a sister to Gay, and was bred by the third Duke of Eichmond as a racehorse ; he 

 was considered remarkably sjjeedy, but neither slow in carrying weight nor run- 

 ning a distance. As a hunter, however, he possessed all the three rare qualities 

 quite to perfection.' Stephen Goodall, the heaviest servant to hounds in the 

 kingdom, rode Curricle for many years. He was bought at a very high figure 

 for His Ivoyal Highness the Prince of Wales, the Prince ever after declaring that 

 Curricle was not only the finest but the best horse he ever saw, and that the 

 best runs he ever witnessed were from the back of his ' dear Curricle.' 



