Thy brute beasts worth by their dams qualities?
Says't thou this colt shall prove a swift pac'd steed,
Onely because a Jennet did him breed?
Or says't thou this same horse shall win the prize,
Because his dam was swiftest Trunchefice
Or Runcevall his syre; himself a gallaway?
While like a tireling jade, he lags half away. [259]
VIII.—HORSE-RACING A LIBERAL PASTIME.
Two centuries back horse-racing was considered as a liberal pastime, practised for pleasure rather than profit, without the least idea of reducing it to a system of gambling. It is ranked with hunting and hawking, and opposed to dice and card playing by an old Scotch poet, who laments that the latter had in great measure superseded the former. [260] One of the puritanical writers [261] in the reign of Elizabeth, though he is very severe against cards, dice, vain plays, interludes, and other idle pastimes, allows of horse-racing as "yielding good exercise," which he certainly would not have done, had it been in the least degree obnoxious to the censure which at present it so justly claims.
Burton, [262] who wrote at the decline of the seventeenth century says sarcastically, "Horse-races are desports of great men, and good in themselves, though many gentlemen by such means gallop quite out of their fortunes;" which may be considered as a plain indication, that they had begun to be productive of mischief at the time he wrote: and fifty years afterwards, they were the occasion of a new and destructive species of gambling. The following lines are from a ballad in D'Urfey's collection of songs: it is called "New Market," which place was then famous for the exhibition of horse-races.