Rugby Days. 71 



Gorhambury Races were in existence in 

 1842, some Cambridge men, hearing that 

 the sister University intended to have a 

 very slap-up drag there, went to great ex- 

 pense to get up a rival coach, in order to 

 cut out their Oxonian contemporaries." 



A somewhat different version of the above 

 transactions is given by Judge Thomas 

 Hughes, Q.C., in his prolusion upon Rugby 

 School, which appeared in the English 

 Illustrated Magazine, in 1891. After men- 

 tioning that in the reign of Dr. John Wooll, 

 which ended in 1827, many "big fellows" 

 at Rugby owned beagles and went out shoot- 

 ing in the neighbouring woods, fields, and 

 coverts — their shooting being almost without 

 exception poaching — and that others who 

 were bibulously disposed had private cellars 

 in their studies, Judge Hughes proceeds to 

 state that when Arnold succeeded to Wooll 

 he found Rugby " as rough and turbulent a 

 place of higher education as ever fell to the 

 lot of any man to take in hand." Judge 

 Hughes is justly and contemptuously indig- 

 nant at the ignorant and impertinent com- 

 ments made by a writer in the Scots Ob- 



