A PRELIMINARY CANTER. 7 



yet be worked up about the conveyance by rail, the 

 imaginative powers of some writers in this line of busi- 

 ness not having become impaired b}' constantly work- 

 ing the same mine of thought. A well-known London 

 editor preferred, he said, the 'copy' of Mr. Blossom, 

 because, being a work of the imagination, it contained 

 sayings and doings of the Derby Day that gave plea- 

 sure to the readers of his paper far beyond what they 

 would have appreciated had the narrative been one 

 of real facts and occurrences, no matter how sensa- 

 tional. 



The social aspects of the Derby, which has been 

 characterized as one vast picnic, have no doubt been 

 so largely drawn upon by those whose duty it is 

 to describe them as to be pretty well used up ; but 

 when the people of the period, their sayings and their 

 doings, fail to afford pabulum to the penny-a-liner, 

 the historic bearings of the race can be called into 

 play — the reader can be reminded that in the year 

 when the first Derby was run (1780) King George III. 

 was on the throne, whilst Lord North was his Prime 

 Minister as well as his Chancellor of the Exchequer. A 

 feature of the first year of the race can also be recalled 

 — the Gordon Riots — and the great facts that London 

 at that time was without gas, and that neither telegraph- 

 wire nor telephone, which are now called into such 

 requisition on the Derby Day, had been thought of, 

 can be made to yield some capital to the Derby 

 describer. That there were no steamboats and no 

 railways, no scheme of universal penny postage, and 

 that a hundred other things which have since come to 

 pass, and which cannot now be done without, wero 



