LETTER VI 



STRONG WORK NECESSARY — ILL EFFECTS OF TOO MUCH 

 REST — NECESSARY QUALIFICATIONS OF THE GROOM 



ANIMALS — particularly horses which we 

 take under our protection — are no longer 

 strangers to pain and sickness ; but, like 

 ourselves, struggle through a " frail and 

 feverish being " in continual danger of their lives from 

 illness ; besides a thousand accidents to which they 

 are exposed from the uses to which we apply them, 

 and the various functions and operations which man, 

 not nature, calls upon them to perform. It is a sub- 

 ject, therefore, beneath no one's consideration as to 

 whence these evils arise, and how they may be remedied: 

 to which may be added, that in few articles which 

 contribute to the amusement of the upper ranks in 

 life is there a larger capital embarked than in good 

 hunters — several studs of which, within my knowledge, 

 have cost their owners no less than five thousand 

 pounds, and upwards. Now, as the late Mr Richard 

 Lawrence observes in his Essay on Diseases of the 

 Lungs, to which I alluded in my last, horses kept in 

 a forced and preternatural state are " always on the 

 verge of some inflammatory disease," the man who 

 may point out one single hint for their preservation, 



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