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 [Illustration: SPRING BLOSSOMS NEAR DORKING.] might be styled "the worst of smokes into the purest of airs." By the middle of the century the waters had won a name; and a little later Pepys found the place so full that he could not get a lodging. Nell Gwynne was another patron at this period. The height of its vogue seems to have been under Queen Anne, whose husband came to drink the waters. Nearness to London must have helped Epsom's favour; and its people were not backward in laying themselves out to accommodate strangers, for whose entertainment were provided the usual gaieties of a watering-place, set off by its situation in what seemed "a great Park filled with little Groves, Lodges, and Retreats for coolness of Air and Shade from the Sun." But it is only in summer, says Defoe, that visitors can be expected, the clays of the lowlands making ill roads for winter jaunts.