INTRODUCTION. 121 



Danish, most likely, furnished most of stature and 

 of beauty. 



It was with these instruments of war and police 

 that the Romans, in this respect far inferior to the 

 Greeks, acted for ages in a spirit of legislation 

 which evinced their ignorance of this branch of 

 national economy. In a host of some thirty writers, 

 poets, philosophers, and amateurs, among whom 

 some few seem to have understood what points a 

 good horse should possess, none felt the importance 

 of improving the breeds they had upon fixed and 

 sound principles; none saw in them more than 

 objects of parade, luxury, war, or draught, that 

 might be bought, like a murrhine vase, for money ; 

 more anxious for the reputation of rhetoricians than 

 for the acquirement of facts, they were busied in 

 the manner more than the matter of what Greek 

 authority had stated, never once correcting an error, 

 supplying a new observation, or discovering a mis- 

 statement; they believed in all the absurdities foreign 

 horse-dealers thought proper to invent, or their own 

 idlers gossiped into omens : such was the case with 



O A 



Cesar's horse, which they gravely relate had human 

 fore feet, and was an infallible sign of his coming 

 fortunes ; and what was at best a mal-formation, it 

 appears, was rendered important by a statue of the 

 animal set up in public. They believed that bay 

 horses were the best to hunt lions, slaty ash colour 

 to attack a bear, and black to pursue a fox and 

 other wild animals. Yegetius asserts that they were 

 constantly the dupes of dealers, who passed off in- 



