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It would seem, however, that this disdain is hardly justifiable, for as a spectacle at least a steeple-chase is certainly more dramatic and more interesting than a flat-race. What can be finer than the sight of a dozen gentlemen or jockeys, as the case may be, charging a brook and taking it clear in one unbroken line?
The steeple-chase course was down a sharpish incline, with a water jump at the bottom, and some fences specially erected, and about the middle of the course a stone wall of loose stones. This course was well in view of the grand stand, as well as from the middle of the flat-race course.
Then follow in quick succession the courses of Amiens, Abbeville, Rouen, Havre and Caen; and in all these places the daily programme will be found to be a very varied one too much so, indeed, to suit the taste of the English, whose notions of the fitness of things are offended by the sight of a steeple-chase and a flat-race on the same track.
The whole thing is coming to partake more and more of the nature of a race, an essentially different thing. Field sports are not races at least they never ought to be. A steeple-chase can never answer the true purpose of the flat-race, which is to prove which is the best horse, to the end that he may ultimately reproduce his like.
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