ce
begin to be confused in their notions of right and wrong. Not long ago I
was struck by noticing a significant instance of this moral dry rot. An
old racing man died, and all the sporting papers had something to say
about him and his career. Now the best of the sporting journalists are
clever and cultured gentlemen, who give refinement, to every subject
that they touch. But a certain kind of writing is done by pariahs, who
are not much of a credit to our society, and I was interested by the
style in which these scribbling vermin spoke of the dead man. Their gush
was a trifle nauseating; their mean worship of money gave one a shiver,
and the relish with which they described their hero's exploits would
have been comic were it not for the before-mentioned nausea.

It seemed that the departed turfite had been--to use blunt English--a
very skilful and successful swindler. He would buy a horse which took
his fancy, and he would run the animal again and again, until people got
tired of seeing such a useless brute taken down to the starting-point.
The handicappers finally let our schemer's horse in at a trifling
weight, and then he prepared for business. He had trustworthy agents at
Manchester, Nottingham, and Newcastle, and these men contrived, without
rousing suspicion, to "dribble" money into the market in a stealthy way,
until the whole of their commission was worked on very advantageous
terms. The arch-plotter did not show prominently in the transaction, and
he contrived once or twice to throw dust in the eyes of the very
cleverest men. One or two neatly arranged strokes secured our acute
gentleman a handsome fortune. He missed L70,000 once, by a short head,
but this was the only instance in which his plans seriously failed; and
he was looked up to as an epitome of all the virtues which are most
acceptable in racing circles. Well, had this dodger exhibited the
heroism of Gordon, the benevolence of Lord Shaftesbury, the probity of
Henry Fawcett, he could not have been more bepraised and bewailed by the
small fry of sporting literature. All he had done in life was to deceive
people by making them fancy that certain good horses were bad ones:
strictly speaking, he made money by false pretences, and yet, such is
the twist given by association with genuine gamblers, that educated men
wrote of him as if he had been a saint of the most admirable order. This
disposition is seen all through the piece: successful roguery is
glorif