270 THE BLACK STOCK. 



activity and more supple limbs; they are conse- 

 quently not seldom used in private carriages. 

 Northampton, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Cleveland have 

 all breeds more or less resulting from the black 

 stock, though their blood is mixed with Norman 

 and the indigenous older races. Among all these 

 heavy horses, there are specimens according to their 

 kind of very great beauty, and stallions may be 

 found that have been valued at four hundred gui- 

 neas, or nearly the same price as a first-rate Arabian, 

 in the English market. * 



Exclusive of the bays and greys already men- 

 tioned, all our heavy cavalry was and still continues 

 to be mounted on black horses ; but without chang- 

 ing the colour, they are now of higher blood, and 

 the Life Guards in particular are from half to three- 

 fourths of the Arab stock. To the unwieldy old 

 form, a lighter and more compact kind of charger 

 has been substituted ; and it is rather a curious cir- 

 cumstance, that while we have been reducing the 

 standard of our cavalry horses, abroad, and in parti- 

 cular in Russia, the government is making efforts to 

 increase the size of its own. While the late Grand 

 Duke Constantine ruled in Poland, as we were 

 informed by one of the chiefs, he raised the stature 

 of all the Lancer horses. 



* M. Huzard, and after him Desmarets, assert that the 

 great brewers 1 horses of London are of the Boulogne race o^ 

 France ; but beyond the mere occasional experiments made by 

 breeders, no French horses, excepting of Norman blood, has 

 met with consideration in England for more than a century. 



