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.