"Vie *perform 311411E 1st 1850
THE DERBY DAY
NEVER perhaps did the grand day at Epsom draw forth such vast multitudes by all the outlets of London. The spectacle in town was very peculiar: the points of departure were more densely swarming than ever ; the Piccadilly Circus looked as if some accident had happened—the people were so thick and so pleasantly excited. The Tocting 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 multitudinous exaggeration of its former self. Somewhat more multitudinous than of old, perhaps, in the ratio of men to coaches—an effect of the railroads. Yet London developed amazing resources in the way of four-horse coaches and postilions. As men, mercantile and civil all the rest of the year, display on that occasion only an inaptitude for any tongue but a sort of jockey lingo,—even those who do not go, but it erely 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 pro- fusely, unearths that bulled and forgotten race with coloured jackets and velvet caps ; as'ff All the World and his wife had just been married and were going out of town for the honeymoon.
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