given vent to his feelings, puts his shoeless toes in the stirrup exactly as the quarter of an hour expires. The poor Englishman, a wondrous economist of time and poetry, dexterously switches his animal over the "raw," and starts at once upon his daily avocations, with no gentler salutation than a "kim aup, yez warmint! d'ye think I stole yer?"
Those noble fellows, the old Greeks, (what the deuce did Byron mean by saying that we already knew too much, about them, as if we could ever, by any possibility, learn enough?) entertained notions like themselves on the subject of horses—witness their magnificent sculptures—witness their magnificent poetry. The trainers of those days, when kings broke their own nags, and blushed not to be caught at it, were somewhat different people, and held in somewhat different odour, from the estimable gentry who play at fast and loose with our modern patrons of the stable. The famous Irish "Whisperer," nay, our old friend Andrew Ducrow himself, could hardly stand a comparison with the "horse-tamer Hector." They talked of pedigrees too, even in those days, with all the accuracy of the stud-book; there was an aristocracy of horses before the time of Homer. The "Xanthus and Balius of Podarge's strain," must have looked down with immeasurable contempt upon the bloodless undescended rips, over whose stiffening carcasses they whirled the chariot of Achilles.
Even in "old Rome, the seven-hilly," (who, by the way, borrowed her fancy for horse racing, as she did most of her more civilized tastes, from Greece,) are still to be found tablets to the memory of the good steed who called forth so frequently the plaudits of the "hoarse circus," recording how often he won in a canter, how many times he "ran a good second," nor even omitting to mention when he was fain to be content with a respectable third. The names of two or three favourites have outlived those of many an "antique Roman," who, doubtless, had his dreams of immortality.
"Sed venale pecus Corythæ posteritas et
Hirpini, si rara jugo victoria sedit.
Nil ibi majorum respectus, gratia nulla
Umbrarum: dominos pretiis mutare jubentur
Exiguis, tritoque trahunt epirhedia collo
Segnipedes."
The whole sad ditty of the "High-Mettled Racer," compressed into five lines of Juvenal! Alas, for the degeneracy of the turf of the nineteenth century! Newmarket and Doncaster boast no Pindar to immortalize their glories—the father of history and his nine muses would attract but a scanty audience in "the ring" at Epsom—nay, we doubt if even our old acquaintance Pegasus, were he to start forth once more in propriâ personâ, would make much of a figure in the betting.
Old Homer has made magnificent use of a horse, as, indeed, he has of every thing else, in that comparison which, for splendour of language, need not fear to be set beside any horse-passage we know, saving only that most wonderful description in the Book of Job, which stands alone in its sublimity:—
Ὡς δ᾽ ὅτε τις στατὸς ἵππος, ἀποσέησας ἐπὶ φάτνῃ,
Δεσμὸν ἀποῤῥήξας θείῃ πεδίοιο κροαίνων,
Ἐωθὼς λούεσθαι ἐϋῤῥείος ποταμοιο,
Κυδιόων: ὑψοῦ δὲ κάρη ἔχει, ἀμφὶ δὲ χαίται
Ὤμοις ἀΐσσονται: ὁ δ᾽ ἀγλαΐηφι πεποιθὼς
Ῥίμφά ἓ γοῦνα φέρει μετὰ τ᾽ ἤθεα καὶ νόμον ἵππων.
Glorious indeed! We positively see him! He flashes before our eyes in his lightning-like speed, as plainly as the hoof-tramp sounds in our ears in the
"Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum"
of Virgil. And now. we have but one fault to find—ay, you may well stare and look incredulous—we, even we, are going to pick a crow with Homer! The comparison is, to our thinking, far too good for Paris. We cannot, for the life of us, picture him as the ardent warrior which it would represent him to be. We are wont to think of him only as the "concinnus adulter," the regular "fancy-man," the pet of the petticoats, whose noblest accomplishment is
"To caper nimbly in a lady's chamber,
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute;"
