14 
Robert Bakewell, 
well’s friends and visitors, and that they have left on record re- 
spectful impressions of his character and work, we may discount 
most of what we read about Newmarket “ gentry,” jockeys’ 
trickery, and the hired pens of those “ itinerant agriculturists” 
who presumably were more familiar with the sound of Bow 
Bells than with the lowing of oxen and the bleating of sheep. 
It appears that even before the days of railway trains, tele- 
graphs, and cheap newspapers there was a class of hangers-on 
about the press, eager to “ write up ” a ram-letting or assist a 
prospective sale. If persons of that class sometimes sought 
interviews with Mr. Bakewell and his brother-breeders and 
followers, and from hospitable men, proud of their flocks and 
herds, obtained material for occasional notices, we can readily 
account for the development of a “ mystery ” about the Dishley 
system of breeding. The results of that system were sufficiently 
wonderful to support any hints of hidden knowledge and secrets 
of practice which such persons would be likely to assume as the 
only possible explanation of those results. To such questioners, 
and to farmers who came to him in the pride of deep-rooted 
prejudice as superiors, accounting him a man of new-fangled 
notions, Mr. Bakewell might not care to be very particularly 
communicative. But to men like Young, Holt, Nichols, Monk, 
and Marshall he evidently unfolded his views very freely. It is 
difficult to harbour the idea that he concealed either his real 
opinion or his I’eal practice when we read their accounts of their 
visits to him at Dishley. 
Bakewell’s success, great as it was in one branch of his 
work as a breeder, cannot be compared with the success of his 
incalculably great work as the leader in the art of improvement 
by a new system. His most distinguished success, unquestion- 
ably, as a single breeder, was in the production of the Dishley 
or New Leicester sheep. The origin of the breed is usually 
regarded as uncertain. Professor Low says : “ All presumption 
is that the basis of Bakewell’s breed was the long-woolled sheep 
of the Midland counties, from which he may be supposed to have 
made such selection as suited his purpose.” Young and Culley, 
however, who both had exceptionally great opportunities of 
learning the truth, concur in giving prominence to the 
Lincolnshire element in the origin. Bakewell himself admitted 
to Mr. Chaplin (as Low states) that at one time he had used 
Old Lincoln rams. What is meant by the term “ the Old 
Lincoln breed ” in Bakewell’s day is a question quite worth 
asking. The Lincolns bred by Mr. Chaplin, Bakewell’s con- 
temporary, were certainly large sheep. From a passage, how- 
ever, in the inaugural address of Sir John Sinclair, in 
