REMARKABLE EQUESTRIAN EXPEDITIONS.
Mr. Cooper Thornhill, an innkeeper at Stilton, in Huntingdonshire, rode from that place to London and back again, and also a second time to London, in one day,—which made a journey in all of two hundred and thirteen miles. He undertook to ride this journey with several horses in fifteen hours, but performed it in twelve hours and a quarter. This remarkable feat gave rise to a poem called the Stilton Hero, which was published in the year 1745.
Some years ago, Lord James Cavendish rode from Hyde Park Corner to Windsor Lodge, which is upwards of twenty miles, in less than an hour.
Sir Robert Cary rode nearly three hundred miles in less than three days, when he went from London to Edinburgh to inform King James of the death of Queen Elizabeth. He had several falls and sore bruises on the road, which occasioned his going battered and bloody into the royal presence.
On the 29th of August, 1750, was decided at Newmarket a remarkable wager for one thousand guineas, laid by Theobald Taaf, Esq., against the Earl of March and Lord Eglinton, who were to provide a four-wheel carriage with a man in it, to be drawn by four horses nineteen miles in an hour. The match was performed in fifty-three minutes and twenty-four seconds. An engraved model of the carriage was formerly sold in the print-shops.
The Marquis de la Fayette rode in August, 1778, from Rhode Island to Boston, nearly seventy miles distant, in seven hours, and returned in six and a half.
Mr. Fozard, of Park Lane, London, for a wager of one hundred and fifty pounds against one hundred pounds, undertook to ride forty miles in two hours, over Epsom course. He rode two miles more than had been agreed on, and performed it in five minutes under time, in October, 1789.
Mr. Wilde, an Irish gentleman, lately rode one hundred and twenty-seven miles on the course of Kildare, in Ireland, in six hours and twenty minutes, for a wager of one thousand guineas.
The famous Count de Montgomery escaped from the massacre of Paris in 1572, through the swiftness of his horse, which, according to a manuscript of that time, carried him ninety miles without halting.