United States or Cambodia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was an especial piece of good luck for the Soplicas that the Count, having better horses than the gentry, and wishing to be the first in the engagement, had left them behind, and had galloped at least a mile 158 in advance of the rest of the cavalry, along with his jockeys, who were obedient and well disciplined, and formed a sort of regular army.
The hard weather is gone for the present, so that London will be pleasanter than it has been, for the Jockeys and Macaronis. Garrick criticised your picture of mine, which he saw at Humphry's; he has that and Sir Charles's; it is like, but not so good and spirited a likeness as Reynolds's certainly. But I am much obliged to you for it.
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?
Broad-backed parti-coloured jockeys are seen converging that way, and the betting-men close in, getting more and more clamorous for odds. What a hubbub! How they bellow! How they roar! A universal deafness seems to have come over the whole of them. 'Seven to one 'gain the Bart.! screams one 'I'll take eight! roars another. 'Five to one agen Herc'les! cries a third 'Done! roars a fourth.
The Romany Rye is a puzzling book. The latter portion, at least, seems to suggest "spiritual autobiography." It reveals the man, his atmosphere, his character, and nowhere better than among the jockeys at Horncastle. It gives a better and more convincing picture of Borrow than the most accurate list of dates and occurrences, all vouched for upon unimpeachable authority.
A thousand matters, the Caisse Territoriale, the arrangement of the picture gallery, races at Tattersall's with Bois-l'Héry, some gimcrack to go and see, here or there, at the houses of collectors to whom Schwalbach recommended him, hours passed with trainers, jockeys, dealers in curiosities, the occupied, varied existence of a bourgeois gentleman in modern Paris.
Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his most wicked sentences, said that the jockey is our Western substitute for the eunuch; a noble duke, who ought to know something about the matter, lately informed the world through the medium of a court of law with an oath that "jockeys are thieves."
And Nana, who was slowly revolving on her own axis, saw beneath her a surging waste of beasts and men, a sea of heads swayed and stirred all round the course by the whirlwind of the race, which clove the horizon with the bright lightning flash of the jockeys.
When John Porter left the stand, the horses had just cantered back to weigh in. The jockeys, one after another, with upraised whip, had saluted the Judge, received his nod to dismount, pulled the saddles from their steeds, and, in Indian file, were passing over the scales. As Lucretia was led away, Porter turned into the paddock. He saw that Langdon was waiting for him.
The jockeys on the wall would have been at home on the lid of a cigar box belonging to any average member of the jeunesse dorée of any Continental city, while an etching of Felicien Rops that lounged upon a sidetable would have been eminently suitable to the house of a certain celebrity nicknamed the "Queen of Diamonds."
Word Of The Day