1 2 The Post and the Paddock, 



City meat salesman ; and Bay M alton had quite lost 

 his form, when this king of the chestnuts came out for 

 his two seasons, 1769-70. The establishment of the 

 St. Leger, Derby, and Oaks in 1776-80, was coeval 

 with the short and brilliant career of Highflyer, at 

 whose christening feast Charles James Fox " assisted" 

 with as much vivacity as he did in after years, at the 

 house-warming of the banker-poet of St. James's Place. 

 Dress, gambling politics, and horse-racing, all fought 

 for absolute dominion over as kind a heart as ever 

 beat. He was a macaroni of the first water, and not 

 only rejoiced in red-heeled shoes, but undertook a 

 journey from Lyons to Paris with the Earl of Carlisle, 

 for the express purpose of buying waistcoats, which 

 formed their sole theme there and back. The Sgavoir- 

 Vivre Club would have been as nothing without him, 

 and he was the first to propose that every man they 

 ruined should be allowed a 50/. annuity, on condition 

 that he never took up a dice-box in it again, and thus 

 caused the club " to play against their own money." 

 He was, too, a heavy better, and a constant visitor 

 at Newmarket, where his portly frame was ever to be 

 seen on his hack, tearing wildly past the Judge's 

 chair, close up with the leading horses ; and until the 

 late Mr. Clark defended a disputed decision by the 

 remark that he '* ought by rights to have placed a tall 

 gentleman, in a white macintosh, first," Lord George 

 Bentinck keenly pursued the precedent. Colonel 

 Hanger had not long ceased to be the bully of its coffee- 

 room, about whose portals it was his wont to lounge, 

 with a ratan, which in grim playfulness he christened 

 " The Infant," when Sam Chifney, senior, took his 

 rank among the first jockeys of the day. Sam wot 

 as little as they did, when he saw a pale, sharp- 

 featured stable lad of Mr. Vernon's try his weight 

 (3st. islbs.) for Wolf, in the May of 1783, that he was 

 the Frank Buckle for whom Fate destined ** all the 

 good things at Newmarket" and elsewhere during the 



