Naked younglings, handsome striplings run Their goals for virgins' kisses; which when done, Then unto dancing forth the learned round Commixt they meet.
The running footmen of the quality were in a manner professionals at the sport that made their duty. Pepys notes how one summer day the town talk among such quidnuncs as himself was "of nothing but the great foot-race run this day on Banstead Downs between Lee, the Duke of Richmond's footman, and a tyler, a famous runner," and how the athletic flunkey won, though the betting was three to four against him. Charles II. and his brother of York both lost money on this "event," and let us hope they paid up.
These princes helped to make horse-racing fashionable, Newmarket being the chief scene of it, where the horses were ridden by noble sportsmen in person, our merry monarch himself acting the jockey. The Banstead gatherings were as yet not so celebrated, still Defoe in his _Tour_ is quite enthusiastic about the spectacle on the Downs when "they are covered with Coaches and Ladies, and an innumerable Company of Horsemen, as well Gentlemen as Citizens, attending the Sport; and then, adding to the Beauty of the Sight, the Racers flying over the Course, as if they neither touched not nor felt not the Ground they run upon: I think no sight except that of a Victorious Army, under a Protestant King of _Great Britain_, could exceed it." That unlamented Prince Fred, "who was alive and is dead," lived for a time at the Durdans, and then gave a cup to be run for at Epsom, which brought its course into more note. But its real fame and fortune date from about 1778, when a sporting Earl of Derby and his friends founded the Oaks and the Derby stakes, to be run for at what ought to be the brightest time of our year, yet the "blue ribbon of the turf" has been won in a snow-storm.
Before the height of its racing renown, Epsom had, we know, had a spell of prosperity as a spa. The mineral water, charged with sulphate of magnesia, is said to have been discovered early in the seventeenth century, through a countryman noticing how his cows--or his ass in a variant story--would not drink it, a reversal of the usual legend, as shown in the leading case of Bladud's pigs at Bath. In Fuller's day "Ebsham" was a resort of citizens coming from what even then