turf are being made subservient to one end-to afford facilities and hold out inducements to heavy betting. Within the present century a society known as 'The Ring'-a set of western Thugs has grown into existence, by whose strange influence the integrity and common sense of those, whose honour and tact in all else are unimpeachable and conspicuous, appear hopelessly paralyzed. While breath remains to me I will never let pass an opportunity, or fail to make occasion when I can, to give expression to my abhorrence of the system of legging,' whether practised by the patrician who has won the silken garter for his knee, or the plebeian who is a candidate for the hempen collar for his throat. Racing once a vital instrument of national prosperity, will soon be little else than an engine worked by a company of cheats and swindlers, for their private emolument.". "Oh! my prophetic soul." ..... As a comment on these foregone conclusions, the subjoined extract from a weekly sporting paper of last month will not be out of

season

THE TURF REMEMBRANCER, OR POCKET PROTECTOR.-We have seen a prospectus of a very useful little work under this title, which we have no doubt will obtain very general circulation. It is proposed that it shall simply contain an alphabetical list of gentlemen troubled with "short memories," who have forgotten to attend to those pecuniary matters so interesting and so indispensable to the patrons of the Turf. The addresses or places of "business" will be given with each name; and, when members of Tattersall's, the names and addresses of the gentlemen who have vouched for their respectability will be added. With respect to provincial gentlemen, their professions and localities will be duly registered, with notes descriptive of their persons and practices when deemed necessary. Particular attention will also be paid to persons figuring under the "betting list" class, as well as those who deal in sweeps, and whose defalcations and swindling pretences require that their names and dens of imposture should be known. "The Pocket Protector," according to the prospectus, is only to be supplied to subscribers, and the communication of names to the directory is to be accompanied by the genuine names and addresses of the parties interested; who shall also guarantee that when occasion shall arise for discontinuing the party in the list published, due notice thereof shall be given. The work, it is stated, is to be published once a month during the racing season-each number being revised and corrected. A great many names have already been communicated, but we think that all should have fair notice of what is intended before publication takes place. From the increasing speculations on the Turf, and we regret to say the increasing number of persons who bet with the intention to receive, if they win, without the power to pay, if they lose, we have little doubt that the best consequences will result from this publication. The size of the book will enable it to be carried in the waistcoat pocket; and as a "text book" at all racing meetings it will be found invaluable "those who read may learn," and avoid at least some of the sloughs which wait to receive them.

This is a pretty significant "squib:" the old saw says "there's no smoke without fire." As I anticipated-" to this complexion it has come at last." Like all violent things, however, it cannot continue long ; the fraternity will swallow up one another in process of time, unless an earthquake should interpose and swallow up the system.

Quite in keeping with the spirit of the age is the proposed passage in Olympics at the Pyramids: some of our steeple chasers will have a "shy" at the great wall of China one of these days. Whether it shall come to pass or not will depend, I apprehend, upon the character of the

venture; John Bull will assuredly run, if it be worth his while. Should it take place, and "The Faithful' do that what is lawful and right by the "Christian dog," I cannot, upon any known data, for an instant doubt the result. I have heard the issue questioned because of the distance to be done in the case of every Arab that I have seen race in this country, the farther he went the more he was beaten. The courser of the desert has thews of steel and a constitution independent of fatigue; but he cannot live with the stride of the English thorough-bred horse. It is the pace that kills. We know what our racers can do, both as regards speed and the faculty of "staying." Tranby's performances in Mr. Osbaldeston's great Newmarket match may be taken as a fair, but not a flattering average of what may be expected from animals of his class. Old Euphrates, Doctor Syntax, Beeswing-scores, hundreds, that we have all seen race-could have done as much, and more. Is there any record to be relied on of an Arab that has accomplished as much as Tranby did on the R. C.? As to numbers, the Pacha will have small chance with us. Some idea of the force from which we can pick may be arrived at from an inspection of the Book Calander of "Races Past," for 1849. Of that stout tome, forty pages are occupied by the names of persons who ran horses in Great Britain in the last year! That the money will be forthcoming, there is no doubt: if His Highness should wish to make it one or two hundred-thousand pounds, as they say in the P. R., "he can be accommodated." As to the honour and glory, and all that, it's moonshine. "Nous avons changez tout cela. If run at all, it will be run for the money.

But as a trial of the British racer it will go for nothing whatever in the result. The class or horse, so denominated, is literally as well as nominally, bred for the turf. A dozen miles over sand and stones do not furnish a criterion whereby to test the property or the purpose of our thorough blood, as applied to the service of the course. Our Hippodrome is a lawn of living velvet, and the animals trained for it are as dainty as the scene of their exploits. But English thorough-bred stock has a wider range of action than mere flat racing. It furnishes the staple for our steeple-chases-stern passages of equestrianism, which, were Mahomet again in the flesh, and mounted upon Pullaway for the Liverpool Grand National, "might give him pause. From some of our

studs appropriated to that energetic sport there might be made "elegant extracts" that would come up, probably, to the Oriental standard. However, the glove has fallen into fair hands; the flower of Albion's chivalry rush to the rescue; once more her belted knights shall beard the Paynim......

"Charge, Chester-field: on, Clifden: Stanley, on!
St. George for England, Peel and Eglinton !"

Having alluded to steeple-chasing, as one of the popular pastimes of our island, it claims a notice in this survey of its sports at the close of the nineteenth century. I have never been its advocate; but I would fain be spared the charge of being its opponent-if indeed such can be objected against me-without fair sporting grounds for my objection. We hunt, it is true; and the aim and end of the chase is "a kill." We shoot, and course, and fish; and existence is the forfeit paid to our skill and success. Is this to be quoted as an argument in support of a

practice which exposes to most imminent risk the limbs, and consequently the life of a noble animal, which stands towards us midway between the relation of friend and servant? I have read, with a feeling much stronger than surprise, statements made deliberately, and under grave circumstances, that there was no more inhumanity, no more hazard of injury, in a steeple-chase than in an ordinary race over a course. I will not affront the readers of these pages by adducing proofs, to show the stuff of which such assertions is made. I saw hundreds of races run last year without a single casualty of any fatal nature to the animals engaged in them. I saw but one steeple-chase, and of the ten animals engaged in it, one broke its back, and was then and there slaughtered, to put an end to its sufferings. Something may be suggested to lessen the chances and hazards of this amusement. I hope it, most fervently. But constituted as it is, with the instant and imminent probability of some desperate, some deadly danger, before the eyes, I cannot forbear avowing that a steeple-chase is, to me, a rural tryst to which the summons is "more honoured in the breach than the observance."

How shall I speak in fitting phrase of the present position of the chase? Despite the dismal forebodings-" sadder than owl songs"which on the outbreak of steam-roads pronounced its fate to be sealed, hunting is not one of the legion of sufferers by the rail. A few districts, into the soul of which the iron has entered, are, no doubt, the worse for it, so far as relates to the field of operations; but they have a balance against this, on the score of additional facility for procuring the materiel necessary for the home department. A very natural anxiety which prevailed as to the consequences to be apprehended from casual visitors has turned out, happily, a false alarm. The capital-or at least the credit-which is required before an appearance can be put in at cover side, will always tend to keep the hunting-field comparatively select. Moreover, hunting is essentially a local affair. A man can go a couple of hundred miles to a race-meeting, with a change of raiment stowed away in a leathern convenience of the size of his wife's reticule; but he can't carry about his hunting appointments and his hunter in the same way. The chase may be compared to an adjective-it can't stand alone. A hunting meet to the stranger is much the kind of thing which Jack has pronounced a voyage for amusement-any one that goes unknown to such a place" for pleasure," may, with a similar prospect of enjoyment, "go to for pas time." Agood run is a good thing, and so is a good dinner, but neither relishes without its best ally-social intercourse. When Lord Chesterfield asked if people ever hunted twice, he was thinking of the act in the abstract. Go and draw a stiff woodland for four hours without opening your mouth except to let in a November fog, and you'll know practically what sort of punishment that is which the criminal code calls "solitary." And how much of hunting consists in drawing, not to speak it profanely-and how much of its zest is compounded of the buoyant interchange of courtesy and good fellowship, which is the bond of social union in the field! Properly to comprehend this, send a horse by rail into some country where you never were before in your life, and where nobody that ever heard of you has a whereabouts. Follow your nag to the fixture; if the wind should be at east, with a brisk sleet, crowned by a "blank," you will go home a wiser if not a happier man. "Omne ignotum pro

magnifico" is a maxim that by no means applies to a first appearance at cover in an English county. Don't let it be supposed that I am a friend of cliquism or that fastidiousness-to use a mild expression— for which our insular idiosyncracy enjoys among foreigners "a bad pre-eminence." But the social medal has also a reverse, on which is inscribed" Liberté ! Egalité! Fraternité!"

Among the élite of manly exercises is that which "occupies its business in the great waters." Yachting has grown in popularity a hundredfold within the last twenty years. Offspring of the present century, its clubs have already spread themselves" far as winds blow and waters roll" around our shores. A regatta is a necessary of life to any place of account on the British sea-board. Our pleasure fleets are familiar with the Line-the sun sets not upon the flag of our amateur marine. The Isle of Wight continues the head quarters of the sport, but Cowes is no longer its sole capital. The Royal Victoria Club, at Ryde, not only surpasses the royal squadron in its "local habitation," but in all the characteristics of a Society lavishly supplied with best appliances and means for social intercourse, and liberal in its promotion of the interests of the town with which it is associated. Its autumnal matches are the ideal of aquatic galas; and its Regatta balls, "with streamers waving in the wind," are coming up with Almack's-hand over hand.

With a club at every sea-port in the kingdom, it follows that river sailing is, in some sort, shorn of its éclât. This, however, is more than compensated by the universal taste for rowing. There is not a stream with depth enough to float a skiff, without its wager boats and crews as dexterous in their craft as though they were "to the matter born." The matches on the Thames between Oxford and Cambridge have become national naumachia, involving interests as wide, and anxieties as intense, as if on the result depended Britannia's prerogative to “rule the waves. The practice of wager rowing fosters one of the most important consequences of those pastimes which in this country are so wisely and so justly called "national sports." It promotes the mingling without the mixing of classes-the most gracious and most gratifying feature of Cricket. It is more especially the pursuit of youth, and the season suited to it harmonizes well with the dramatis persona. Few scenes in life present a pageant so rife with materials for curious thought as a rowing match on the Cam or Isis. As the acorn to our wooden walls is the stripling of the oar and wherry to the enterprise which made

ocean our own.

Cricket comes more within the limits of rural pastimes than those robust avocations of leisure and recreation known in this country as sports. The mauvaise plaisanterie which represents a French princess, who was taken to a cricket match, after witnessing it for an hour, inquiring" when the play would begin?" is a complimentary illustration of the character of our manly games. The dolce far niente forms no portion of the national appropriation of such spare time as the interests of more serious occupation place at an Englishman's disposal. On summer evenings the village greens are occupied by groups of youths, just emancipated from their daily toil, engaged at their simple wickets, bowling and batting with an energy that would seem to imply "increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on."

There are people who are pleased to call this a degenerate age:" as regards the spirit of our sports and manly exercises, the case is exactly the reverse. Tiger shooting, lion hunting, and "pig sticking," whereby is meant single combat with the wild boar, are among the élite of the rural recreations of the "degenerate" sons of Young England. Colonel Napier, in his last most amusing work, gives an account of a Scotch gentleman of the name of Cumming that he fell in with in the course of his travels, who is at present, and has been for several years consulting his pleasure in circumventing the lions of Central Africa. This pastime he pursues in a pit, the mouth of which is baited with a dead rhinoceros. Is there anything very effeminate in a taste of that sort?

How do the energetic followers of old Izaak Walton pursue their liquid pastimes? Not seated upon camp stools by the side of murmuring brooks; not promenading the banks of purling rills, but far away in regions hyperborean; where ocean also hath its monsters; where the angler's eye encounters the sea serpent, and regards the salmon as at home it was wont to look upon the smelt. The fisherman, in the days of our fathers, contented himself happily with the Lea, or bent on daring emprise ventured forth to the Severn or the Dee. It is not very long since I lunched on board the galley of a disciple of the gentle craft who was about to weigh anchor for the Pacific, to shoot whales with congreve rockets. How would Dr. Johnson have designated such a fashion of fishing as that?

Five-and-twenty years ago Nimrod witch'd the world with feats of noble horsemanship; with anecdotes of the "crack riders" of Leicestershire, and other shires renowned in the annals of the chase. In those celebrated Olympian odes, "The Billesden Coplow Day," and "The Balruddery Hunt," brave steeds and bold riders are chronicled, but nothing that comes within everlasting space of the neck-or-nothingism of the Bechers, Olivers, and "Old Mucks" of the last dozen years. Among fast amateurs I take leave to instance my ally and friend the late Squire of Halson-the Jack Mytton of Nimrod's ill-conceived memoir, and the Marquis of Waterford.

"When George the Third was king" your man about town was not accustomed to circumnavigate the globe; the grand tour of those days was not a voyage round the world. An ordinary cruise of our yatchsman is now "round The Horn and home." The very general disposition to relax the rigour of game-preserving, and the fast waning popularity of that climax of sporting abominations, the battue, are among the healthy and promising signs of the times in reference to rural amusements. There is a spreading spirit of liberality moreover, as regards territorial exclusiveness, fast growing up among large landed proprietors in all parts of the kingdom. The sons of fathers who looked upon the pheasant and partridge as the Egyptian upon the Ibis, give their tenants carte blanche to shoot over their farms, and to invite a friend occasionally to carry a gun with them. In courtesy and flavour, if I may be permitted the application of the term, the hunting-field has advanced a hundred-fold within the last quarter of a century. The chase is no longer a licence for coarse manners and habits; a device for killing the time of the pursuers as well as the animal pursued. There is not a man perhaps in existence who now makes fox-hunting the whole and sole