Part 21

“After a careful examination of all the best authorities bearing upon the condition of the Turf in that so emphatically called its palmiest era--the middle of the last century--I find nothing to warrant the belief that, as a species, the contemporaries of King Herod, Imperator, Eclipse, Florizel, and Highflyer, possessed either speed, power, or symmetry, unknown to the racer of our day. At the very date to which this extraordinary excellence is ascribed, we find the degeneracy of that particular breed the subject of legislative consideration; and in 1740 that an Act of Parliament was passed, denouncing the Turf as the cause of the growing debasement of the breed of horses all over the kingdom, and fixing the weights to be carried in all plates and matches at ten stone for five-year-olds, eleven stone for six, and twelve stone for seven-year-olds and upwards, on pain of a penalty of £200, and forfeiture of the horse. It is true that this Act was repealed soon afterwards, through the intervention, as it was believed, of the Duke of Cumberland; nevertheless it is manifest that there must have existed strong grounds for complaint against the system of breeding and racing before the consideration of its economy would be made a subject of Parliamentary interference. Let us turn to the weights carried by two-year-olds fifty years ago, and those common to the present period,--the former averaging from six stone to six stone six pounds, the latter from eight stone five pounds to eight stone seven pounds, and what evidence of degeneracy does that furnish?” Racing, wherever we meet it existing as a popular sport, is the growth of a root indigenous to England. All the appliances of civilization are carried to a higher degree of perfection among us, in the present day, than at any former period of our history: the Turf, and all its _materiel_, it cannot be doubted, has attained a comparative condition of excellence.

In a nation peculiarly attached to rural sports, that, as matter of course, becomes entitled to the place of honour which diffuses the greatest portion of enjoyment to the greatest number of people. In this view, racing is well entitled to the pre-eminence which it has so long claimed, and had conceded to it; but it prefers demands of a higher nature than its mere pleasurable results. In a political sense, it is an engine of no mean importance. A state must benefit largely from an agency which exhibits its nobles promoting, at great individual cost, a sport in which all classes can participate equally with themselves, and which brings together all the divisions of society for one end and purpose--social recreation. Where shall we seek the great moral of England’s power and station?--In the wealth which commerce pours upon her shares?--In her wooden walls?--In the skill, learning, and valour of her sons? We can scarce study it in a more impressive page than that yearly spread before us at the great popular re-unions of Epsom, Ascot, and Doncaster. Let such as love such lore, then, search after it where the examination will surely reward their industry: we will take it up, abstractedly, as a pastime, and in that character look into the nature and influence of its present economy.

As a treasury of art, an assembly of learning, ingenuity, and pleasure, our metropolis has many rivals--some superiors: in our rural life we stand alone. Mainly this has been brought about by--is the consequence of--a general taste for field sports. Whether the cause of morality is served by horse-racing, it is not our province to inquire. An inelegant but most _apropos_ salt-water axiom says, “every man to his post, and the cook to the fore-sheet.” Mankind, since the creation, has set its face against all work and no play, and will do so to the end of the chapter. We are of the disciples of Democritus; and, feeling in the vein, will just touch in here, merely in outline, a faint sketch of a DERBY DAY.

Perhaps, with one exception alone, none of the realities of life come up to the anticipations of them; and what, you ask, is that singular deviation from the general rule?--It is a DERBY DAY. Imagine a conglomeration of two millions of souls stirred to its _penetralia_, shaken from its propriety, morally earthquaked, because of the necessity which annually requires that a certain portion of the mass (say a fortieth) should rendezvous in a neighbourhood where certain horses are to contend some two minutes and sundry seconds for certain monies, and you arrive at a general idea of something by no means in the ordinary course. The scene of this commotion is London, the majority of the actors automata that make yearly one solitary diversion (in both the word’s interpretations) from the regular cycles of their orbits. But such a Saturnalia demands a word anent its note of preparation.

As soon as the month dawns, big with the catastrophe of Epsom Races, straightway from Belgrave Square to Shoreditch, from the Regent’s Park to uttermost Rotherhithe, forth the sackage goes that guts, from garret to cellar, every Pantechnicon, Bazaar, and Repository of all and singular the wheeled conveniences and inconveniences peculiar to each. Anon the horse, in all its infinite gradations, is had in requisition, from Newman’s choicest specimens of blood, that devour the Surrey highways, to the living quadrupedal skeleton redeemed from the knacker’s knife at the last Smithfield show for fifteen shillings, and a “drop o’ summut for luck.” The day arrives, and lo! a mighty chain of carriages, “in linked grumbling long drawn out,” extends from the Elephant and Castle to the merry Downs of Epsom, whitherwards we will suppose thy anxious way hath at length been achieved. The moisture of travel encumbereth thy brow: searchest thou for thy best Bandana to relieve thee of the damp? Luckless wight!--

“----That handkerchief Did an Egyptian from thy pocket prig.”

Is not the tide of humanity at the flood of spring? Ten deep do vehicles of all kinds, definite and undefinable, line the course. Opposite and around the stand all is high-bred and aristocratic: lower down, leading for Tattenham’s classic corner, you haply take your curious path. What lots of pretty girls you encounter as you go!--each so lady-like and _bien mise_, you would never dream of their metropolitan whereabouts, were it not for those awful mortalities that cluster around them; brothers, cousins, lovers it may be--pale shadows that haunt the glimpses of Bow Church--horrible illusions from Ludgate Hill and the Ward of Cheap, with prickly frills to their linen, swallow tails to their coats, green velvet waistcoats, or, still more shocking, similar habiliments of black satin, whereon the indecent chain of Mosaic grins ghastly, like the gilding on a coffin!--faugh!

Drawing near to the lines, hark! from glass coach, britscha, jarvey, phaeton, proceed various sounds of discontent.--“Cold chickens, veal pie, lobsters and _no_ salt.”--“Half-a-dozen bottles is all very fine, and never no corkscrew.”--“Sir, I’ll set that right if you’ll only accommodate us with the loan of a glass; really it’s too provoking.”... Ascend the hill, approach the Ring, and hear what sums are jeopardied on the coming event!--enough to purchase half-a-score of German principalities; but the warren is open, and thither you are borne by the countless thousands who throng for a glance of the coursers on whom hang the hopes and fears of all.

No spot can be better adapted for the purpose to which it is assigned than the so well-known warren; but all that nature has done man takes especial care to frustrate. Instead of its cool quiet alleys being kept for the tranquil preparation of animals peculiarly disposed to excitement (their most dangerous foe at a moment when the entire possession of every faculty is of such vital consequence), every “dingle, nook, and bosky bourn” is invaded by a horde of ravenous, sight-seeing cockneys, of all beasts of prey the most reckless and perverse. Amid this restless crowd of babbling, cigar-smoking untameables, the process of saddling is effected, and, with graceful steps, the fiery-footed adversaries depart for the lists.

You reach the place of starting, and what awaits you there? Order, decorum, and all fitting arrangement for the important essay of which it is the arena? A second chaos!--all the human elements thrown together in a moral whirlpool. A score of men in buckram suits (blue linsey-wolsey), attempting to dispose of twice as many thousands--something like barring the gates of a beleagured town with boiled carrots! They draw together for the start--infinitely the most influential point in the great game to be played. Here all is confusion worse confounded: the multitude opens its thousand throats of brass; the steeds are frantic; the jockeys (born and bred devils from their cradle) practise every conceivable stratagem ever hatched in Fiendom; and there stands one nervous old man to front the pitiless pelting, and produce from such materials a result with which all are to be satisfied. “They are off!” and the old gentleman, in his agony, pronounces “go,” and the fatal signal has gone forth. Over the hill, adown the fall, there is a meteoric flash, as though a rainbow had borrowed the wings of the lightning, and all is over!

The Derby is decided--the steeds turned round--the jockeys approach the scales--Holy Mother of Moses! has it entered the heart of man (even an Irishman) to conceive the tearing and swearing, the howling and screeching, that instant rends the empyrean! Quick as thought a circle of bludgeons and constables is formed, into which the horses as they arrive are received, and against which a roaring ocean of humanity is dashing as fiercely as the vexed Atlantic. Look towards the grand stand--behold whole acres of countenances uplifted to the sky, wedged as closely as a crate of French eggs, and resembling nothing as yet discovered but a monstrous dish of opened oysters! The round earth is shaken, and echo gives up the ghost--the thunder hides its diminished head, as with the bellowings of ten thousand volcanos myriads of furious lungs crash forth, “WHO HAS WON?” Thus whilom did I sing of this scene; and with better experience, save in the episodes of flying voltigeurs, men “with never no back-bones at all, only a slip of gristle to hold head and heels together,” and epicures in cutlery, “who swallow knives and forks for all the world like gingerbread nuts,” I can add nothing to the _beau ideal_ of a DERBY DAY.

How little can they, who first give existence to a principle, foresee how it will operate, and what may be its results. The pastime of horse-racing, fostered and promoted simply as a channel of amusement by the gay and thoughtless Charles, called into being the strongest impulse of man’s nature--emulation, and thus entailed upon this country a race of the noblest of all existing animals, of a character apparently superior to that originally destined by nature. This may be an erroneous theory, but as yet we are unacquainted with any variety of the horse comparable to the artificial stock known as our thorough-blood. The very general efforts that were made from that period by the nobles and great landed proprietors to improve by lavish outlay, and all the appliances which it can command, the best strains of the recently imported Oriental blood, towards the middle of the last century, seem to have carried the race-horse _as a species_ as near to perfection as his generic organization will admit. True, every year produced some few infinitely superior to their contemporaries, but they were phenomena,--indebted to no individuality of parentage for their excellence, and unpossessed of the faculty of endowing their descendants with similar gifts. As a race, when opposed to the indigenous horse of any quarter of the earth, the English thorough-blood is universally victorious; among the various families into which it is divided at home, no _constant_ succession of superiority has ever discovered itself.

I am aware that those who only take a superficial view of the economy of our racing system will at once pronounce against this position. They will adduce the sons and daughters of King Herod, Eclipse, and Highflyer; in our day, of Sultan and Emilius, as far surpassing the ordinary run of their contemporaries. But they do not bear in mind that not only did and does the progeny of these justly celebrated sires greatly outnumber that of their less favoured brothers, but that the best mares of their respective eras were and are exclusively put to them. Not to travel beyond our own day for proofs, did excellence ensure its like, what chance would have remained to those who now and then breed a solitary nomination against the gigantic studs of Hampton Court, Riddlesworth, or Underly? To confine the question to the present year (1838), we had evidence that not all the wealth, skilful training, Sybarite care and treatment of the best of England’s blood could produce a match for the son of one of our indifferent racers,--the despised of an Irish tenth-rate stable,--the wonderful and the basely-abused Harkaway.[82] I may be told that he was defeated here, and by second-raters, too,--but under what circumstances? With ordinary care, without having been subjected to actual ill-treatment, at weight for age there was nothing of the year in England that could have stood any chance with him.

[82] This extraordinary animal is now (December 1838) advertised for sale, his price six thousand guineas, with this strange addition, “that his owner (Mr. Ferguson) rides him hunting once or twice a week!”

From these premises the deduction at which we arrive bearing upon the economy of the turf, its nature and influence is twofold, and admits of a very brief solution,--the first being that the day is long passed since the means of winning upon the race-course were to be obtained by breeding; the second, that the vast advantages still to be derived from a proper application of our thorough-blood is most strangely neglected. Mr. Bowes began his racing career by breeding a winner of the Derby, while the late Duke of Leeds, the most extensive breeder of blood stock in the north, toiled in vain for the Leger till he won it with a colt bought from the tail of the plough. Lord George Bentinck, the best winner on the turf of modern days, if the Calendar be any criterion, regards breeding racers as an expedient no man in his senses should dream of, and, acting upon his theory, has put money in his purse. A first-class racer, a colt of extraordinary promise, are each productions of chance-medley, only to be come at by being secured where and when they can be found.

But if the Turf be thus restricted in further profiting, save as matter of hazard, by the means which securely ministered to the success of its first speculators, it furnishes materials from which may be moulded other distinct races, as valuable, each in its province, as the flying family of the modern race-course, now the sole representatives of our thorough-blood. The ragged regiment of cock-tails will, it is devoutly to be hoped, speedily be disbanded; the day soon arrive when no gentleman shall be seen bestriding the mongrel of a base-bred hackney, scarce worthy the shafts of a costermonger’s trap. And first, as is befitting, such reform must commence with its next of kin--THE FIELD. Shall this, assuredly the second--nay, the twin-sport of racing, in the esteem of Englishmen, long continue dependent upon chance for a supply of horses for its service? Impossible; the period cannot be far distant in which the British thorough-bred hunter will be as distinct a race, and of as high renown, as his progenitors were the pride of the Turf.

HUNTING.

As the whole object of the Manly Exercises is not accomplished in the attainment and practice of them, it was thought convenient that the business of their details should be succeeded by a partial notice of some of those sports of which they form the elementary process, and which may be regarded as their ultimate “end and aim.” It has been well said by my talented friend, Nimrod, that all the writing in the world will not make a sportsman. The pen of Pindar, and the pencil of Grant, indeed, exhibit him in all perfection to our admiration; but, could they both write for the education of the student whose ambition is Olympic fame, they would not insure success. Like the poet, he must be born, in a manner, to his cunning.

The Exercises, upon which Mr. Walker has written, admitted of being inculcated by methodical rules, and acquired by a systematic routine of practice. An acquaintance with them will be found of service to youth, whatever the destination of its manhood may be; while they are essential to the formation of a frame and character fitted for the maturity likely to be devoted to the wear and tear of our hardy Rural Sports. Driving and Yachting, though neither of them strictly coming within the pale of a course of physical exercises, still are not out of place in a practical book devoted to the science of manly recreations, because each is governed by certain rules, which may be taught and acquired. It is not so with the subjects constituting the matter on which we are at present engaged. A man may out-study Zoroaster without being one whit the better qualified for winning a fifty-pound plate, hitting off the line of a fox that has been headed, or bringing down his woodcock in cover; these are arts which, being decimated, leave one part to theory and nine in favour of practice. For this cause I have made my Article on the Turf of a character more suited to the purposes of the general reader than those of the visionary theorist, who may fondly hope to meet, on page traced by mortal hands, a recipe for breeding, training, and managing an embryo winner of Derby or Leger. The Chase, however, admits of a certain code of general maxims: it has, if not limits, at all events courses better defined than those of the Turf, and to the application of them by practical men of modern experience we will at once proceed.

Assuming that a tolerable proficiency in horsemanship has been attained before the young disciple of Diana ventures to show at all with hounds, he will do well to dedicate the first of his novitiate to hare-hunting, whether his future destination be that of a M. F. H., or merely a partaker of the “light from heaven,” dispensed by the “noble science.” As this little treatise addresses itself more particularly to the latter, it will be sufficient to point out what should be his aim in his early lessons. Of these, the most essential to the formation of a good sportsman, and the only one that will enable any man to live to the end of a severe run, is, that he cultivate the faculty of a _quick eye to hounds_. With harriers he will constantly have practice in this task: the perpetual doubles to which nine hares out of ten, when chased, resort, will soon convince him of the necessity of keeping a wary look out for the line towards which the leading hounds incline. He will have little difficulty in deciding with which portion of the pack, or with which individual of it, the scent is, if he only observe closely when there is any indication of a check. The instant a hound catches the scent, he will see him drop his tail horizontally, and spring to the front, the one who has lost it elevating his, as if engaged in questing. Keeping his look-out always upon the leaders, and leaving the body of the pack to follow a similar system, he turns his horse as he sees the chase lean, and thus is going at his ease _inside_ the circle, around which others can hardly live at the best their nags can accomplish. When a huntsman is coming past with hounds,--particularly at check in a lane or road,--get out of his way all you can; the narrower the pass the greater the necessity that you give room, or hounds must break over the fence, and so run the risk of putting up, or crossing the line of, another hare: moreover, horses on such occasions are apt to strike out at hounds, and it is far from pleasant to be constituted by such a casualty “the observed of all observers.”

In the matter of riding at fences, with harriers you will be more enabled to suit your practice to the individual case than when you come to ride alongside fox-hounds. With the former, when any thing very cramp crosses your line, you may “look before you leap,” and this is no bad maxim, whoever may choose to sneer at it. Let this too be an axiom from which you never depart, as far as regards the hounds: when you are out with the jolly dogs, “hear and see, and say nothing”--so shall you earn golden opinions from the field in general, and prevent much out-pouring of wrath from the officials in particular. It will serve you to bear in mind that in almost every difficulty of ground a horse can serve himself better than you can assist him. I do not mean to say that in heavy, deep galloping you should not hold him together, and if there be a furrow or path at hand, that you should not give him the advantage of it. But in woodlands, for instance, where young timber has been felled, and the surface is covered with live stubs, give him his head: let him pick his own way; never touch his mouth with the bridle to guide him, and you will find how rarely he will give a chance away. Thus in a rabbit warren the difficulty is doubled by the nervous man who attempts to steer his horse. The biped is looking at one hole, the quadruped at another, and being diverted from the spot where he intended to place his foot, puts it _in_ where it was meant that he should not. Still, however, you may attempt it: never charge ground of this nature without using the precaution of slacking your pace. I remember a well-known bruising rider, who thought it impossible that he could be hurt, once trying the experiment over a warren in the neighbourhood of Whitchurch, in Shropshire, and being assured of the affirmative in the first hundred yards by the fracture of his collar-bone, and the dislocation of a shoulder.

With the common run of fences, where the grip is from you, go faster at them than when it lies on the side you take off from. When they consist of live thorns and quicks newly laid down, take them, whenever the chance presents itself, _aslant_, rising where the top of the thorn is laid, as being the least capable of holding your horse’s knees, should they catch in rising at it. In your noviciate it is hardly necessary to offer you any advice as to water. As a general rule, however, it may as well be said here as elsewhere that, in brook-jumping, pace comes first and then judgment. With a powerful impetus you get over; should your horse blunder, somehow--if with a fall at the other side, no matter: less speed enables you to pick your ground better, but it throws all the odds on the side of a cold-bath, should the span be wider than you calculated on, or the bank be soft, and let you in. Never take hold of your horse’s head till you feel that he is safely landed; if there is a scramble for it, and you pull at him but an ounce, it may turn the beam of his equipoise, and in you go together.