The Derby is decided--the steeds turned round--the jockeys approach the scales--Holy Mother of Moses! has it entered the heart of man (even an Irishman) to conceive the tearing and swearing, the howling and screeching, that instant rends the empyrean! Quick as thought a circle of bludgeons and constables is formed, into which the horses as they arrive are received, and against which a roaring ocean of humanity is dashing as fiercely as the vexed Atlantic. Look towards the grand stand--behold whole acres of countenances uplifted to the sky, wedged as closely as a crate of French eggs, and resembling nothing as yet discovered but a monstrous dish of opened oysters! The round earth is shaken, and echo gives up the ghost--the thunder hides its diminished head, as with the bellowings of ten thousand volcanos myriads of furious lungs crash forth, “WHO HAS WON?” Thus whilom did I sing of this scene; and with better experience, save in the episodes of flying voltigeurs, men “with never no back-bones at all, only a slip of gristle to hold head and heels together,” and epicures in cutlery, “who swallow knives and forks for all the world like gingerbread nuts,” I can add nothing to the _beau ideal_ of a DERBY DAY. How little can they, who first give existence to a principle, foresee how it will operate, and what may be its results. The pastime of horse-racing, fostered and promoted simply as a channel of amusement by the gay and thoughtless Charles, called into being the strongest impulse of man’s nature--emulation, and thus entailed upon this country a race of the noblest of all existing animals, of a character apparently superior to that originally destined by nature. This may be an erroneous theory, but as yet we are unacquainted with any variety of the horse comparable to the artificial stock known as our thorough-blood. The very general efforts that were made from that period by the nobles and great landed proprietors to improve by lavish outlay, and all the appliances which it can command, the best strains of the recently imported Oriental blood, towards the middle of the last century, seem to have carried the race-horse _as a species_ as near to perfection as his generic organization will admit. True, every year produced some few infinitely superior to their contemporaries, but they were phenomena,--indebted to no individuality of parentage for their excellence, and unpossessed of the faculty of endowing their descendants with similar gifts. As a race, when opposed to the indigenous horse of any quarter of the earth, the English thorough-blood is universally victorious; among the various families into which it is divided at home, no _constant_ succession of superiority has ever discovered itself.