BAILY'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF SPORTS AND PASTIMES. SIR HENRY JAMES TUFTON, BART. IT has been remarked that it would be difficult satisfactorily to explain the deep interest with which nearly all sections of the English public regard a coach and four horses. True, we are a horse-loving, not to say horse-worshipping, nation; but yet that will hardly explain why, in the height of the season, fashionable and unfashionable London flock to the banks of the Serpentine to gaze at the long procession of the Four-in-Hand and the C.C., and we must go back to the old associations of a now old generation-the coaching days of our childhood, when the music in three feet of 'tin,' combined with the speed of the Tantivy trot,' were our ideas of travelling excellence-to seek the cause. The traditions of those days have descended from father to son, and, fostered by the sporting tastes of men able to indulge in them, have created a passion for coaching which seems likely to take root and abide. To it the season is indebted for a new show, and a new pleasure has been provided for those perchance a trifle blase with the accustomed round. Four and twenty coaches, all horsed and driven to perfection, is a more exhilarating sight than superintending pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham; a drive to Alexandra or Richmond much more pleasurable and exciting than the daily penance on the Ladies' Mile. There are degrees in coaching and coachmen, a senior school and one much its junior. We have paid tribute in these pages to the representatives of the former, among whom may be classed the Earl of Macclesfield, the Duke of Beaufort, Earl Poulett, Mr. W. H. Cooper, and the late Mr. Morritt, men able to hold their own against the best gentlemen coachmen of sixty years since who stirred the dust of the Brighton road, or, farther afield, tooled the Edinburgh and Glasgow mails. About two years ago we gave our readers a portrait of the leading representative of the juniors, Lord Carington, and we VOL. XXVII.-NO. 186. 0 2 |