patron of everything in it, till his death. He had a fancy for cocking, coursing, and harriers, as well as being a supporter of the "sock and buskin" in most country towns visited by him in the course of his calling. There is, I believe, a short biographical notice of this celebrated jockey in print, in which his eccentricities and peculiarities are given in an amusing style. There is also a young Buckle, a nephew of old Frank, yet in the corps, but a man of slight reputation in the saddle.

Jem Robinson, as we have before stated, excels all men we ever saw in a match; an assertion amply justified by the way in which he made one himself with a sister or sister-in-law of "Billy Nash" of Windsor, a prime, manly little fellow with one arm, and the best maimed man in England across a country ;* Jem rode the winner of the Derby and Oaks, and was married within the week, to fulfil a prediction, as some say, but, as others think, a bet. We remember seeing Robinson win a match at Newmarket-amongst hundreds-when nothing but the most consummate judgment and exquisite riding secured him the victory. Between the two horses, that came bowling along, like chained shot from start to finish, there was not an ounce to choose. Between the men there was less, for old Sam Chifney was Robinson's opponent; and so near a thing was it across the Flat, that it was only owing to Jem's selecting the "foot-trod" over the heath,-judging truly that the daily labourer wending his way to and from work, does not go many hair's-breadths out of it,-that he got his horse in first by a nose. The firmness, yet elasticity, of the foot-path would equally aid him, whilst the narrow track, only sufficing for one horse, thus secured, compelled his competitor to keep on the slightest possible curve from the line taken as straight as a crow would fly by the accomplished Jem.

The literary groom, Holcroft, gives in his Memoirs some curious history of life in racing stables, as well as an account of the wasting essential to most jockeys to enable them to ride the different weights. With those in high repute it is needful to remain in condition from about three weeks before Easter to the end of October, though a week or a fortnight are quite sufficient time for a rider to reduce himself from his natural weight to sometimes a stone or a stone and a half below it.

This reduction is accomplished through sweating, exercise, and a strict dietary, amounting to partial abstinence from solid food, and the greatest temperance in liquids, whilst in preparation for a race. This discipline, severe as it is, does not appear to injure the constitution in the least; but, on the contrary, would really seem to give an increase of vigour, as the flesh-far from superfluouswastes piecemeal from the bones. In an inquiry instituted by Sir John Sinclair in reference to this subject, it was stated by Mr. Sandiver, a surgeon long resident at Newmarket, that John Arnull, when rider to the Prince of Wales, was desired to reduce himself as much as he could, to enable him to ride a particular horse; in consequence of which, he abstained from every kind of food, saving an apple occasionally, for the space of eight days, and declared himself

*To our sad memorials of departed friends,—victims, in part, we cannot but believe, to the over-anxious pursuit of Sport !-we grieve to be compelled to add the name of poor Nash, who died in the prime of life, during the passage of these pages through the press.

not only uninjured, but in better wind, and altogether more fit to contend in a severe race than before he commenced this unnatural course of diet.

When moderately reduced, through exercise taken in a suit of proper sweaters,-say about eight or at most ten miles' brisk walk, -repeated for two or three days, nothing can exceed the delicious sensation of health and elasticity which comes over a man after being rubbed down with a coarse towel, and fresh clothed for the remainder of the day. The effect is visible on the skin, which assumes a remarkably transparent hue, whilst after a repetition of such regimen condition follows every sweat, till the jockey becomes as sleek as the animal he is going to ride. We speak from experience; once on a time seldom moving without a suit of flannelsweaters in our portmanteau. These, with a heavy pea-jacket or two, woollen gloves, and a warm cloth cap, will in a brisk walk for a couple of hours, especially if the sun shows himself in earnest, do that for a man suffering from indigestion, plethora, or acidity in his veins, which all the doctors and "'opathies" in the quack's pharmacopoeia cannot accomplish. The most mortifying attendant upon wasting is the rapid accumulation of flesh, through a relaxation of the system; it having often happened that many jockeys have gained, after the very least indulgence, more in weight than they could reduce themselves in a couple of walks. There was, I mind, a favourite sweating-ground with the Newmarket jocks, of about four miles out, to a snug cabaret kept by a "Mother Onion," or some such name, whither a whole brigade of bow-legged, antiquevisaged, little gentlemen, carrying as much clothing as would suffice for many much taller personages, might be seen, bathed in perspiration, either swinging their arms to-and-fro to increase the muscular action, and tramping after each other in single file on the footpath bordering the high-road, or else encountered over the public-house fire, scraping the perspiration from their heads and faces with a horn carried for the purpose, precisely as a race-horse is scraped after a race. After resting thus for half an hour or so, and imbibing a tumbler of warm beverage to increase the sweat, they return at a good pace to Newmarket; perhaps "turn in" for a short time, and lie covered with blankets, in addition to their load of sweaters, when they finally strip, and groom themselves carefully for the evening.

Some men are bad wasters, when nothing but very severe exercise, aided by medicine, and the most complete self-denial, under every craving appeal for food, suffices to get off the last twentyfour ounces. Sam Chifney, Bill Scott, and Robinson, were all tall men by comparison with others of the fraternity, and consequently not so easy to reduce; and being in constant demand in many a dining-room, as well as on the heath, the mortification they endured may be imagined. But, the season once concluded, few men are more convivial, or hospitable, than the jockey, when ample revenge is taken upon the sporting Lent they have conformed to so piously.

A REVOLUTIONARY RAMBLE ON THE RHINE.

BY THE FLANEUR.

FLÂNEUR.

WHO is there, who many a time since the month of February 1848, of distracting memory, has not felt himself surfeited with the dishes of politics crammed down his throat, whatever his craving in general for this species of exciting intellectual sustenance, and has not sickened at the very name of revolution, much as he may have considered himself hardened to the sound of the word? The well-spiced peppery food of politics has palled at times upon the palate, in spite of the seasoning of excitement; and even those who have embarked, more or less personally, upon the seas of revolution, have, although they may have considered themselves too tough sailors to experience any mere qualms, felt the nausea again rising at some new lurch upon the stormy ocean. The Flâneur owns both to the surfeit and the nausea; and when that restlessness, which is one of the necessary ingredients in the composition of every flâneur, during this summer of the second year of our European revolution, vulgarly called the year 1849, became, as is the wont with flâneurs, an uncontrollable disease, which imperatively demanded a cure by change of scene and clime, after going through the usual flâneurial stages of impulse, desire, and mania, he took up his map, not to see upon what shifting soil of revolution he might be hurried from one scene of excitement to another, and give his curiosity all that kaleidescope variety of gratification, which our stirring times flash before the eyes in such dazzling confusion,-as, like a genuine Flâneur, he should have done,—but to find out some quiet country, where he might flâner in the very idlest do-nothing spirit of flânerie, and fully enjoy that dolce far niente, which, however it may be supposed to be one of the ingredients in the composition of a flâneur, is by no means, or ought not to be, one of his chief characteristics-at all events, as times go. Holland, at first sight, offered a sedative for the over-excited spirit. "As dull as ditch-water," is an old homely expression. What might dulness, combined with ditch-water, not do? Holland afforded thus, both morally and physically, a water-cure, to allay irritation, with every known characteristic of the true 66 wet blanket." But then the Flâneur, having also, by the way, no great faith in the universal effects of hydropathy-however great his faith and fantasy in general-had too chilling a recollection of former visits to that country, where he felt too much sympathy in the shuddering antipathy of Voltaire to the "canaux, canards, canaille," putting in, however, a protest against the sweeping use of the last word-to try the plunge of such a cold bath to all excitement again. Belgium lay closer still at hand, enjoying all the quietude and prosperity with which well-timed experience, in the avoidance of the evil example of its next-door neighbour, and aptitude to learn a lesson, has so signally blessed it. The Flâneur might there hope not to have his weary ears scarified with the word "revolution," in every third phase, or his brain clogged to congestion by the pressure from without of politics apropos des bottes, as it would have been, of a surety, in France, where even the word "boots" would have suggested at once the map of Italy, and entailed an inevitable disquisition upon Italian affairs. But Belgium was declared

to be overrun with all sorts of fashionable refugees, from all sorts of unquiet lands-a species likely to be continually moaning upon the losses which fashionable exclusiveness had undergone in the aforesaid lands, and thereby not pleasant companions in days when sympathy in such matters has died out. In Spa, too, it was said, poor wandering flaneurs found no rest for the sole of their foot on first arrival, or pillow for their weary heads, seeing its overcrowded condition. And, moreover, a Flâneur has an intuitive aversion to machinery, manufactory-chimneys, and modern inventions. Now, with such matters Belgium abounds, assuming a most Birmingham-like physiognomy more and more, in defiance, and to the confusion of, its romantic old towns, so full of works of art. Not much further lay old Father Rhine; and, spite of the weariness which a professed Flâneur, upon a hundredth trip thither, may feel at his overrated allurements, his bald vineyards, melodramatic skeletons of ruins, and the make-believe majesty of his so-called mountains, and especially at the conceitedly vulgar airs he was wont to give himself in latter years, there remains, however, a sort of spurious halo about his very name, and a charm in the reminiscence of that youthful enthusiasm, with which when first escaped from England, the Flâneur gazed for the first time upon this famed show-stream of the Continent, and wondered, and admired, and poetized, as most boys will; and there is a comfortable glow of feeling in any such reminiscences, however it may be warmed up.

Now it might be supposed that Germany, formerly so sober and so staid, was well nigh sick of revolutions, after more than a year's unhappy and ill-profiting revolutionising. A revolutionising Frankfort Parliament had long since died a natural death, although not without sundry last convulsions. Prussia had declared that it had subdued its revolution at home, and was quietly constitutionising "for self and Germany."

:

The last frontier insurrection in the lovely but unhappy Duchy of Baden had been subdued by cannon and bayonet, and Prussian muskets and sabres were hung up like trophies all over the land as banners and guarantees of peace. There was every appearance then, at a distance, of quietude upon the banks of the Rhine: there was a very evident lull in revolutionising, at all events; and a lull after the storm is repose. The Flâneur, then, thought himself safe from politics, and the spell of revolutions, in trusting himself upon the borders of prostrate, wearied, and, as he fondly supposed, revolution-disgusted Germany he sought the repose in the lull; he resolved upon a very quiet, sleepy, unexciting, soothing ramble on the Rhine. Why then has he headed his sketch of his last flânerie a "Revolutionary Ramble?" Ah! why indeed? Where was his experience, or at all events, that which every flâneur ought to possess, more or less, in human nature in general? Where was his experience in German nature in particular? With a little reflection he might have bethought him that the soberest fellows, who have borne the steadiest of characters for years, when they once go ahead," upon the path of "life," make the very worst rakes; and when soundly trimmed for their pranks, only become the worse hypocrites, and are all ready to plunge again into the whirlpool of debauchery, the sweets of which they have so late discovered, and cannot stop to sip at now; and, by a little anology, he might have reasoned that the Germans, long considered "sober old boys" in the matter of politics, and "steady fellows" in all their relations of life, would, when once they had drunk deep

intoxicating draughts of revolution, even to the constant drunkenness of riots, and the delirium tremens of insurrection, become the most madly debauched of revolutionists, and, even when "soundly trounced," be no ways cured of the new tricks learned in their old days. The Flâneur, in German character too, had reckoned without his German host, or rather not reckoned upon German heads. He chose to forget that, as these fermenting receptacles of crude notions, in which the ingredients thrown into them were always seething and sending up clouds of obscuring vapour, had been in philosophy, so they were likely to be in their political fancies, and that their politics"run-mad" once taken into them, would be ceaseless coming out of their mouths, with that constant recurrence of the same senseless phrases, which is peculiar to the language of the madman-that, although the hodge-podge of patriotism, nationality, progress, liberalism, people's rights, German unity, central power, and such like materials, after being stirred about by the spoon of revolution, and over-salted with plentiful grains of red-republicanism, had produced only a most unsavoury, unpalatable, and, above all, indigestible stew, and the fire beneath it had forcibly been extinguished, there might yet be living embers among the ashes, and the cauldron might still be seething below-that the Germans, children in politics-and thickheaded, obstinate children too!-were not to be taught the lesson of experience, and were not likely to learn it any the more quickly for a whipping-that, like true children again, they would cry for their toy of revolution, sulk when they were told to lay it down, because it was an "edged tool," that was sure to hurt their inexperienced fingers, and struggle when it was wrenched from their hands-that the Germans in fact, were, in this contradictory spirit of character, likely to be the last of revolutionising nations to be sick of their new revolutions, or at all sobered by experience, or by that moral katzenjammer (cat's wretchedness) as the German's have it, to express the "seediness" after a drunken debauch, which must succeed revolutionary intemperance-and that he, the Flâneur, was thus in a fair way of seeing the quiet ramble on the Rhine, on which he had decided after much selfdebate, in search of anti-political rest, converted, as it was, into one of the revolutionary nature hinted at above. His blindness appears to him now to have been utterly wilful and perverse.

Imagine the Flâneur whisked across the whole kingdom of Belgium, from west to east, along that wondrous railway, a great portion of which has been not unaptly compared to a needle passed through the middle of a corkscrew, from the rapid and seemingly interminable succession of alternate snatches of open road in valleys, and tunnels under mountains, and upon which all the fairy tales of childhood's days are realised-for is not the fiery monster, which conveys the traveller, the real and true enchanter's dragon, as it now darts through the magically opened bowels of the earth, now flies over the plain, now issues from a huge castellated vaulted gateway, called a tunnel-facing, which evidently is the portal of an enchanter's castle; now thrusts itself into another similar opening in the mountain-side, frowning above with towering battlements, and evidently belonging to some comrade magician, ever snorting smoke and vapour from the nostrils of its head of burnished brass and green, and dragging swiftly after it its long, winding jointed tail, in verity and truth the true old living fiery dragon of old times? Imagine the Flâneur, then, whisked to the banks of the Rhine in the search of quietude. He hopes to find it at Cologne,