rather pleasant in the sight of a merry lad who attends his first Derby, for he sees only the vivid rush and movement of crowds; but to a seasoned observer and thinker the tremendous panorama gives suggestions only of evil.  I hardly have patience to consider the fulsome talk of the writers who print insincerities by the column year by year.  They know that the business is evil, and yet they persist in speaking as if there were some magic influence in the reeking crowd which, they declare, gives health and tone to body and mind.  The dawdling parties who lunch on the Hill derive no particular harm; but then how they waste money and time!  Plunderers of all sorts flourish in a species of blind whirl of knavery; but no worthy person derives any good from the cruel waste of money and strength and energy.  The writers know all this, and yet they go on turning out their sham cordiality, sham congratulations, sham justifications; while any of us who know thoroughly the misery and mental death and ruin of souls brought on by racing and gambling are labelled as un-English or churlish or something of the kind.  Why should we be called churlish?  Is it not true that a million of men and women waste a day on a pursuit which brings them into contact with filthy intemperance, stupid debauch, unspeakable coarseness?  The eruptive sportsman tells us that the sight of a good man on a good horse should stir every manly impulse in a Briton.  What rubbish!  What manliness can there be in watching a poor baby-colt flogged along by a dwarf?  If one is placed at some distance from the course, then one may find the glitter of the pretty silk jackets pleasing; but, should one chance to be near enough to see what is termed “an exciting finish,” one’s general conception of the manliness of racing may be modified.  From afar off the movement of the jockeys’ whip-hands is no more suggestive than the movement of a windmill’s sails; but, when one hears the “flack, flack” of the whalebone and sees the wales rise on the dainty skin of the immature horse, one does not feel quite joyous or manly.  I have seen a long lean creature reach back with his right leg and keep on jobbing with the spur for nearly four hundred yards of a swift finish; I saw another manikin lash a good horse until the animal fairly curved its back in agony and writhed its head on one side so violently that the manly sporting-men called it an ungenerous brute.  Where does the fun come in for the onlookers?  There is one good old thoroughbred which remembers a fearful flogging that he received twenty-two years ago; if he hears the voice of the man who lashed him, he sweats profusely, and trembles so much that he is like to fall down.  How is the breed of horses directly improved by that kind of sport?  No; the thousands of wastrels who squander the day and render themselves unsettled and idle for a week are not thinking of horses or of taking a healthy outing; they are obeying an unhealthy gregarious instinct which in certain circumstances