Ticrf History. 9 



sterns, or " ate in dreams the custards of the day," till 

 they found themselves saddled with a debt of 99,700/. 

 Their estate at Rossington, whose partridge and 

 pheasant preserves had year after year been laid 

 under contribution for the Mansion House kitchen- 

 range, which was rarely allowed to cool, fetched nearly 

 that sum at the hammer ; and their less toothsome 

 and more business-like successors have turned these 

 sporting propensities to better account, and make an 

 annual seven or eight per cent, out of a 25,000/. race- 

 course outlay. 



Although its general history is wrapped in much 

 obscurity, the turf had made no small advance wher 

 one Reginald Heber published the first number of the 

 Racing Calendar, in 175 1. The preface, which is in itself 

 a literary curiosity, announces " the sacred estimation" 

 in which the publisher holds " my munificent and 

 voluntary subscribers ;" and further, promises the 

 most lucid details of cocking matches, " where and 

 who were the losers of them." The races in Hyde 

 Park had long been done away. Sir Philip Neil, and 

 his four Flemish mares, which were fed with Rhenish 

 wine and cheese-cakes on one of those gala days, were 

 forgotten. Snipes, unconscious of General Ogle- 

 thorpe's fowling-piece, were still drinking in the 

 marshes on the present site of Conduit-street. Wild 

 fowl were almost tempted to linger at evening among 

 the bulrushes of the willow-walk of Pimlico. Islington 

 still gloried in its mineral water and its custards. 

 Roystering benchers had ceased to lose dice between 

 the boards of the Middle Temple floor ; and Mrs. 

 Hudson, of Covent Garden, had not yet devised her 

 " stabHng for one hundred noblemen and their horses." 

 The apprentice lads chased ducks on the Moor-le-field 

 ponds all Sunday morning ; and then paid pennies to 

 the old women as they came out of church, to tell 

 them where the text was, that they might have where- 

 withal to answer their church-going masters at dinner ; 



