The Turf Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. " Led to and fro by passions, still we fly From vanity to vanity." It would puzzle the reader to find out from -what author this quotation is ... more »drawn— we will candidly tell him, from chance. Chance is the soul of the turf, and, as a turf man, we have sought for it in all the scenes of life and walks of society. Wandering one Sunday evening before dinner, when time hung heavy on our hands, we entered a methodist meeting, where thepreacher and the congregation had all in their favour against us—for they were full of the spirit and we were not, and they had no lack of food whilst we were fasting. In this assembly of penitents, of sinners, of idlers, of assignation-makers, of paupers, and of humbugs—living, poor worthies ! upon simples— we heard the lines of our motto given out and sung, with all the cant and rant that art could dictate, or stupefaction and stultification dwell upon ; and as it struck us that the text was a truism, we have presumed to transport it from the tabernacle to the turf. Mercy defend us from the tongues of the one, and the secret operations of the other ! We will now prosecute our story, not omitting to observe, that the giver out of the lines in question accented them with emphasis, and varied the sounds of the word vanity, " from va-ni-te to va-ni-ty," to chime with fly—a nice discrimination, a happy play and gingle upon words ! We, means every body and nobody, and is the language of the all-powerful press. Well, brother sportsman-reader, if such perchance be now casting a glance over these pages, vanity has hugely mixed up with the mushroom rich upstarts who practise on the turf and table, as the following account will fully prove. The fraternity of legs, it may be remembered, foiled in their projects and defeated in their...« less