in short, a species of slightly mitigated Mantalini, in high life of the year в.с. 1193. To us the strongest point of resemblance between Paris and the "fed horse" appears to be (to use, we hope not profanely, the words of the Prophet), that he "neighed after his neighbour's wife." But we are waxing a little bit too classical. "From the sublime to the ridienlous there is but a step," as every body knows who knows any thing whatever; indeed the quotation is so stale, and the fact so universally admitted, that we should hardly have inflicted it again on the defenceless public, had we thought about the matter, and must trust for our excuse to a certain villanous John-Bullish kind of habit we have, of blurting out what ever comes first into our heads, with. out stopping to enquire whether it has any business there or not. We met, the other day, with a beautiful pendant to the old Greek's picture, in a passage descriptive of the Bengalee breed of horses, from the pen of a Captain Williamson : "The said horses," says the facetious son of Mars, "have generally Roman noses, and sharp narrow foreheads; much white in their eyes, ill-shaped ears, square heads, thin necks, narrow chests, shallow girtles, lank bellies, cat hams, goose rumps, and switch tails." The gallant Captain would, we fear, be somewhat puzzled to draw a portrait, merely from such a description as that with which he has favoured us. We are told that the "new-discovered people of the Indies, when the Spaniards first landed amongst them, had so great an opinion, both of the men and the horses, that they looked upon them as gods, or as animals ennobled above their nature." Well, the poor doomed barbarians went but one step beyond nations who bore, in their time, the palm for civilisation. Horses have received funeral honours, and have had cities called after their names, without exciting any such smile as that with which you just now treated the simple Americans; and, though we do not recollect that they have ever been actually deified, they have, at any rate, enjoyed the highest honours of mortality. What an exquisite piece of satire was that of Caligula, when he nominated his horse to the office of consul! Sheer madness, said you? No, no. Like Hamlet, he "was but mad north-north-west ;-when the wind was southerly, he knew a hawk from a hand-saw." Tyrant as he was, he had sanity enough to observe and despise the abject grovelling of the bipeds of Rome, and boldness enough to hold it up to scorn by the appointment of his quadruped favourite. If it were madness, it had method in't. Only fancy the terrors of the patricians in waiting, lest the newly made func.. tionary should take it into his head to stretch his consular hind-leg without giving warning! We once heard a pragmatical young prig of a Cantab (a Johnian, of course) observe, that he must have been a mostincorruptible magistrate, for he answered all improper applications with a nay; and we thought of the dictum of Samuel Johnson, buttoned up our pockets, and made ourselves scarce forthwith. Paul of Russia was mad, an' you will, when he ordered to be starved the honest horse which had offended only by a stumble: his own end was happier only because more speedy. And as to that king-making and kingdeposing Lord of Warwick, who stabbed his war-horse in cold blood before the battle of Towton; for the sake of a nature otherwise noble, it were to be wished he had been so too. You may read how he met with his deserts on the obelisk at Barnet Common. Like We have read somewhere of a young French renegade, who confessed to Chateaubriand that he never found himself galloping alone in the desert without a sensation amounting to rapture; and though we cannot speak from personal experience either of "antres vast or deserts idle," we think we can manage to enter into his feelings. Montaigne, "we do not willingly alight when we are once on horseback; for it is the place where, whether well or sick, we find ourselves most at ease." We know of nothing more glorious-nothing more inspiritingnothing which more effectually dispels from one's spirit the glooms, and the mists, and the fogs, which gather round it so thickly in this "workingday world," than a good stirring gallop across an open country; and, should it chance to be at the tail of a pack of foxhounds, why we think it not a whit the less inviting, and doubtless our horse would appreciate it far more fully. We really are unaffecť Talk of Somerville, indeed, after Sheridan Knowles! Lombard Street to a China orange on the Irishman!and "no takers," as they say at Tattersall's. Prattle not to us about cruelty to animals! We would give a trifle to tie one of your doubledistilled humanity-mongers upon a thorough-bred hunter, and start him from the cover-side on a brisk January morning, with a full field and a burning scent, just to convince him that the biped is not the only animal that takes a pleasure in the burst. If he did not come home stiff, skinless, and, albeit against his will, converted, we would be content never to follow hound and horn again. And now we will stroll out to Verey's, and swallow ice; for we have Philippicised ourselves into a perspiration. Often as we have polished the pavé of Oxford Street, we have never yet learned to saunter along with that stoical, or rather cynical, indifference to every thing save pretty faces and slender ankles, which distinguishes the exquisite of the present day. We shall be taken for country cousins all our life long; we are continually losing ourselves in wondering contemplation of the passing scene; and we are continually losing, par consequence, our pocket-handkerchief. Here may you observe that wonderful animal Man in all his varieties, from the duke to the dustman-here may you admire that generous brute the horse in every" Hoy, hoy! you there! Get out of the way, can't you?" Mercy upon us! we were within an ace of making a job for Mr Wakly; and his twelve good men and true that butcher's nag had wellnigh annihilated us! There he goes! gallopgallop-gallop! We verily believe a butcher's horse doesn't even know how to walk. At any rate, we can safely swear we never saw one practising that pace. We certainly have heard of their being occasionally discovered, in the rural districts, standing still at the yard-gates of country gentlemen; but, when once in motion, it seems to matter nothing whether it be hill or dale, town or country, highway or byway, crowd or clear. There is ever the same unvarying, reckless speedthe same headlong, break-neck, oldwoman-slaying gallop-the same"Now, sir, a leetle on one side, if you please!" Ah! as we live, our old acquaintance Tollit, and the varmint Oxford "Age." There are not many prettier things, to our thinking, than a well-appointed coach, "tooling" along a level road at the rate of ten miles an hour, including stoppages. That identical team now has, "many a time and oft, transported us to the embraces of our revered Alma Mater, and we look upon it with an eye of more than common affection. We have ourselves not unfrequently handled those very ribbons, and wielded that very silvermounted whip, dexterously disturbing many a meditative fly from his dream of happiness on the ear of the off-leader. See! they are off again! no shirkingno hanging back-one slight tug-one gentlest hint of the whipcord-and away they go, "light as a bird on wing." Eleven o'clock!-why, that sleepy old fellow of All Souls, in the inside corner, will be at his own college-gate just in happy hour to realize his heaven-sent vision of hall-dinner. We think it is no less an authority than Nimrod-not the mighty hunter of ancient, but the mighty scribbler of modern, days-who says, that the life of a coach-horse in a crack team, well-fed, well-housed, well-groomed, and lightly worked, is beyond all question the most desirable state of equine existence. We defy the most "cruel-hearted cur" under heaven to stop and look for five seconds at a London hack cab-horse, waiting for a fare, without being moved to pity. Take, for instance, the third in yonder line-observe the hairless, fleshless, almost skinless, ribs-the weak and tottering fore-legs-the dull eye and the droop ing head the "raw" but too plainly visible underneath the collar-the shrunken carcass, for which the shafts, narrow as they are, are yet a world too wide." Watch him, as he mumbles the contents of his scanty nose-bag-positively he has hardly spirit enough left to swallow his miserable pittance! - there he stands, the very picture of patient, uncomplaining misery. And yet, most probably, before we are a hundred yards off, that wretched anatomy will be tearing through the town with an almost railroad velocity, and endangering the lives of a thousand harmless subjects of her most gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, at the corner of every thoroughfare in London. For the sake of your loving wife and affectionate family, venture not to cross his path! He is not the same horse that he was five minutes past; a change has come over him, -a new spirit has possessed him. He seems to rush along the streets with a recklessness which nothing but the extreme of misery could inspire: there is despair in his face, graven as plainly as with an iron. Life has nothing worse in store for him, and the sooner he escapes from it the better! Alas! happy, even in his wretchedness, that he cannot look forward four or five days into the future, and behold that last, that crowning scene of equine misery, the yard of the knacker! And now turn about, as you love a contrast, and look for a minute at that dray of Meux's as it comes thundering along over Claridge's Patent. Saw you ever such a Daniel Lambert of a horse as that fellow at the head of the team? He drags along that ponderous machine, laden as it is with "the good barley-wine which our forefathers did use to drink of," with as much ease as we would the toy-cart of our youngest born, who is but just out of his long-clothes. Do but listen to the sound of his hoof upon the pavement, and fancy for a moment, if your nerves will allow you, your worst corn awaiting its next descent! Proud is he, bad taste of his though it be, of his plaited main and tail;-(we would rather see them swing about, as Tommy Moore says of Norah's robe," as nature pleases;")-proud is he of his brassbedizened head gear-proud of his size, his strength, and his occupation; nor altogether unconscious of the admiration he is exciting. His very shake of the head implies a scorn of the lanky, weedlike things that ever and anon flit by him, unworthy, in his opinion, of the name of horse ;the razor-faced, spare-necked, delicatelegged, bang-tailed exquisites of the race; the paragons of Rotten Row and the Outer Circle-the cynosure of ladies' eyes the admiration and envy of lawyers' clerks, linen drapers' apprentices, and Sunday swells of every possible species and description. See with what sublime complacency he regards that yelping cur that madly leapeth at his august nose, and trembleth not even to snap at his majestic heels! How would a less philosophical "tit" shy, and sidle, and prance, and toss his indignant head, and "yerk out his armed heel" against the audacious assailant; - but not so he-he, disdaining so inglorious a foe, looketh down with calm contempt upon the vain efforts of the scurvy tyke to arouse his wrath; and heareth with magnanimous pity the howl of the offender as he limps lamely away from the lash of the avenging drayman! Whatever nonsense-we are going to fly off at a tangent-whatever nonsense Byron may have talked about the superfluous amount of knowledge respecting the old Greeks, he was himself any thing but a despiser of them. He inherited, to its fullest ex. tent, their admiration of horses, or he could never have written Mazepра. Of that glorious poem, the horse, and not the man, is, to our thinking, the hero. The worthy Hetman is somewhat somewhat quaint and "rude in speech," and garnishes the story of his audacious amour with one or two pithy practical maxims, which go far to deaden the interest which we might otherwise feel for him, and his mistress, in a double sense. Of course we pity him, but still not with that pity which is "akin to love." But the horse! to him we can give ourselves up heart and soul-pity him as he struggles, " fiercely but in vain," to burst from the unwonted shackledash away with him away! away! like lightning to the desert, which, though it be death to man, is to him life, and happiness, and home!-start with him at the groan wrung from his helpless burden by the extremity of suffering-speed away with him from the hungry wolves that howl faintly and more faintly upon his track, though he hears them not, thinks not of them-his speed, his thought, is for his home-plunge with him into the wild rush of waters-strain with him "up the repelling bank"sink with him at last beneath the overpowering trial-summon every energy to greet once more the companions of his freedom-and weep, ay, weep, that it should be too late! We know not a finer picture in all the painting of poetry than this of "the dying or the dead," with the startled denizens of the wilderness careering wildly around them, and finally scouring off to the forest from the majesty of man, unsubdued even by that agony. fidel, the Cid Ruy Diaz Campeador, and his good horse Bavieca? From the days of Odin and his " coal-black steed" upwards, there is scarce a hero of "tradition, legend, tale, or song," who has not his favourite; and black, by the way, seems to have been a colour in high estimation. There are one or two black ones of date more modern, and reality more unquestionable, than that of the monarch of Valhalla, which, albeit disdained or overlooked by historians, may take their station in the records of their race beside the most renowned of antiquity. The Scottish peasant, as he tells his offspring the tale of the too dearly won field of Killiecrankie, still couples the name of the gallant Claverhouse with that of his charmed war-horse, Midnight: the fame of "the horse of the highwayman, Bonny Black Bess," need fear no oblivion, so long as the "ignominious tree" spares one bold Clerk of St Nicholas to pour a midnight libation to the memory of Richard Turpin.* There are few heroes, of whatever creed or clime, whose glory has come down to our own time, and whose names and deeds, however remote their day, are still "familiar in men's mouths as household words," whose favourite horses have not come in for a share of their well-earned fame. Alexander had his Bucephalus-that-which yet stand before our eyes with tameless steed who brooked no rider save the conqueror of the world-that faithful servant who, reeling with his death-wound, yet called up all his failing energies to bear his lord to safety, ere he sank and died? Oh Arrian! Arrian! much indeed hast thou to answer for, who darest tell us, in the teeth of so bright a legend, that he succumbed to thirty years and an Asiatic climate! Nor are there wanting others-foals of the fancy-steeds of the imagination all the vividness of reality, to whose existence our affections cling, in despite of our colder reason, with a regular John-Gilpin-like tenacity. Even as fabling gossips, who, by frequent repetition, bring themselves to an incorrigible belief in their own mendacious anilities, we have gradually so increased and cemented our acquaintance with them, as to render them as it were a part of our very selves; and the moment that convinced us of their positive nonentity, would, we verily believe, go far to plunge us into a state of universal scepticism. Never be thy memory uncherished, O chosen destrier of the valorous Manchegan, -most fitting bearer of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance! - thou who, though thou hadst "more corners than a real," didst yet retain, even in thine advanced age, some smack of thy Talking of Dick Turpin reminds us of Mr Ainsworth's novel or romance, or whatever he pleases to call it, Rookwood, and of Turpin's ride to York therein; the admirable telling of which feat has alone, we suspect, saved the rest of the book, cleverish though it be, from the "deep damnation" of the critic's "Bah!" Where may be matched the descriptions of three such rides, and for three such purposes, as those of Turpin, Mazeppa, and John Gilpin? The first for life-the second for death-and the third (which appeals more touchingly than either to the feelings of Englishmen) for a good dinner, youth; ay, even when that simple squire deemed that thy "lovelesseye" might gaze unmoved "upon all the mares in the meadows of Cordova." Most patient of sufferers! Most stoical of steeds! Most immortal, incomparable, incontinent Rozinante! Nor be thou forgotten, whose high privilege it was to bear into a hundred hair-breadth 'scapes" the weight of that most "valiant bumpkin," hight Hudibras; thou who wert Sturdy, large, and tall, With mouth of meal, and eyes of wall;" thou of the" strutting ribs" and "draggling tail;" thou who hast in all men's memories a "local habitation" though not a name; and who, nameless as thou art, art yet immortal! But alas! we are all this while but touching a note to which there is no answering chord we are telling the tales, and feeling with the feelings, of a bygone age! The spirit of a mighty change is abroad. The men of the time to come, will look back with contempt upon the horse-loving generations of the past-the "cura nitentes pascere equos' will be a thing unknown to our grandchildren-the "gratia currus" will be confined to the railroad train and the monster balloon : there cometh fast upon us an age of boiling water and hydrogen gas, before whose dawning beams the Sun of Newmarket, and the Stars of the Four-in-hand Club, must alike "begin to pale their ineffectual fires!" The signs of the times, as an execrable civil [?] engineer had the impertinence to tell us the other morning, appear daily more in-horse-picious, and the position of that animal in society is growing rapidly more un-stable. The last of the race will soon, we fear, be cooped up in a ten-feet square crib in the Zoological Gardens, and we shall be compelled, malgrè nous, to travel in the first class. But "grieving's a folly," as the song says, or at any rate very nearly related to one. A few words more, and we have done. We have kept one of our very particular favourites, as a sort of bonne-bouche, to reward the exemplary patience with which you have suffered us to gabble on so long after our own fashion and liking: and, curiously enough, we have drunk it from the same source which furnished us with a similar peace-offering when we had that long Spring morning gossip about things in general, and puppy dogs in particular, and which you were then pleased, as we recollect, to receive so graciously. You cannot surely have forgotten the dog of Roderick! Of course you have not, and we beg your pardon for even hinting at the possibility. Well then, look here upon another picture from the same master pencil. The battle has been fought and won the pride of " the lying Ishmaelite" has been signally crushed - the long-forgotten war-cry has been once more heard the sword of the traitor has "found bloody work" in the grasp of the true man-the good horse has borne his ancient lord to "the last, the happiest of his fields." Spain has been delivered_but where is the deliverer? Has he parted and left no trace? Yes, one; but alas! an unavailing one "On the banks Of Sella was Orelio found; his legs And flanks incarnadined his poitrel smear'd |