THE DERBY DAY.
NETER perhaps did the grand day at Epsom draw forth such vast multitudes by all the outlets of London. The reaction on the scantier attendance a few seasons back, with the report of im- proved attendance more recently—the better season as to cash- the beautiful weather—all conspired to e the increasing popu-
lation of the. Metropolis as represented on Epsom Downs.
le in town was peculiar: the points of departure were more Ziestetry swarming than ever; the Piccadilly Circus looked as if some accident had happened—the people were so thick and so pleasantly excited. The Tooting road at noon was a river of men, horses, and carriages ; even the way by Kingston was crowded, almost like what the Tooting road used to be within the memory of men— that is of some men. The race-ground, of course, was only a mul- titudinous exaggeration of its former self. Somewhat more mul- titudinous than of old, perhaps, in the ratio of men to coaches— an effect of the railroads. Yet London developed amazing re- sources in the way of four-horse coaches and postilions. As men, mercantile and civil all the rest of the year, display on that occa- sion only an inaptitude for any tongue but a sort of jockey lingo, —even those who do not go, but merely ride an omnibus the other way, to business, catching, as it were, the reverberation of the strain,—so London, once a year, and once again at Ascot time, only far less profusely, unearths that buried and forgotten race with coloured jackets and velvet caps ; as if All the World and his wife had just been married and were going out of town for the honeymoon. 'Phis headlong devotion to the sport is curious, on divers amounts. Probably no sport is so brief and transitory in its crisis as that of horse-racing: the laboured preparation of a year explodes in three minutes. It is not a national fête. Enormous as the crowds are, drawn as its members are from many classes, it is practically restricted to the class that can afforJ some kind of carriage : it does not include the bulk of the people. And the best
of the joke is, that a very small proportion of the crowd that come fifteen miles to see the racing really do see it : those on the grand stand see it ; those in tall carriages see a portion ; the happy frontage of the crowd catches a glimpse of the passing steeds : all the rest, the tyrant majority, merely go down to Epsom to stand
in its own light—to understand that a race isgoing-forward—to hear the sheers in front, and to learn that such a horse has won - and " the favourite " has lost ; a fact which could have been learned at less expense of "blood and treasure "—transmuted bleed, of course—without leaving town.
But if not a national means, the Derby day is a national sign. On Wednesday you could read as plainly, in the well-dressed and
gay throngs, as you can read the converse in the bankruptcy-lists of the Gazette, that it has been a better season. The display of wealth in carriage-hire, railway-fares, paletots and waistcoats, lun- cheons and champagne, sandwiches and pale ale, was enormous. England flourishes, and flowered on that day in a vast parterre of jockeys and gents. N. Ledra. Rollin might have mourned over that material refutation of his 'wishful work on the Decadence de 'Anyleterre,—unless he had derived consolation from that veil in which Young England is learning to cultivate "manly sports" without spoiling her complexion: invading France might think as little necessary to fear Young England in a veil as Caesar to fear Pompey's pretty-faced recruits.
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