ABSTRACT
The most successful gambling clubs were not founded by sportsmen; Crookford was a fishmonger, Almack a valet. In a generation which can boast among its more enduring products the verse of the late Sir Wilfrid Lawson, it may seem superfluous to insist that jocund inebriety is no longer good form. Gone is the type of buck who bade his man put two bottles of sherry by his bedside and call him the day after to-morrow. The fox-hunting squires, who sat down to table at four in the afternoon and moved under it about eight in the evening, are as extinct in Britain as the sabre-toothed tiger. The grandson of the great Louis did not live to come to the throne, but some of the keenest sportsmen of olden time have worn the Crown. The sporting parson, a type of sportsman apart, deserves a digression to himself. The most esteemed of all sporting parsons in the annals of the chase was Parson Russell, of Devonshire.
