usand
spectators, Pownall thinks, met on the downs.

But Pownall has nothing to say of the road. The road must have been the
thing to see; not as we see it to-day, when motor cars start for the
course before lunch instead of before breakfast, and luxurious railway
trains draw decadent race-goers to Tattenham Corner. In the real Derby
days all racing men that were men drove to Epsom, early in the morning,
by the road. Four-in-hand coaches travelled level in the pack and the
dust by costermongers' donkeys; at every inn there were touts and
tipsters, haunting creatures with secrets of betting; they knew what
would win outright and what would certainly lose; the Duke's trainer had
whispered to them, the swindling Captain had tipped them the wink; you
merely had to pay for the knowledge. Wayside strips of green were turned
into cocoanut shies, wherever a man might wish to shy at nuts; clowns on
stilts stalked in chequered blue; bare-legged boys and girls turned
amazing Catherine wheels. There was the hill to finish with by the
course, and the plaudits of the crowd for him who took his team up in
spanking style. They still drive four-in-hand coaches up the hill; but
the motor-horn follows the coach-horn.

Frith has made the Victorian Derby day immortal; a less well-known hand
has written of what Frith painted. The author who signed himself
"Sylvanus," and wrote with an admirable gusto of racing men and racing
scenes in the forties, has set down in his _Bye-lanes and Downs of
England_ a strange picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In
his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of
a gibbet"--_similia similibus_, you might suppose reading the list of
heroes who met there. "The 'plunging prelate and his ponderous Grace';
my lord George, the 'bold baker,' and Mr. Unwell; Sir Xenophon
Sunflower, the Assassin, and the flash grazier; the Dollar, hellite,
billiard-marker, and bacon-factor; the ringletted O'Bluster,
double-jointed publican, Leather lungs, and Handsome Jack contrasted in
the pig's skin; and, ye Centaurs! what seats were there!" It must have
been a sight for proper men to see. Not the veriest tailor would walk on
Derby day. He "would mount a mis-teached hippogriff, and risk the chance
of a purl, rather than not show at the covert-side." Who, indeed, would
not bestride a steed when he might meet the Assassin and the O'Bluster
in the ring? But there were others:--

At the time w