300 HORSES ANCIENT AND MODERN. 



sides slightly or tightly, as prosperous or adverse cir- 

 cumstances may require. We are assured that this atti- 

 tude is not only highly picturesque, but particularly 

 easy to the rider, who, while partaking of the undulat- 

 ing motion of the horse, can rest his wearied body by 

 slight imperceptible changes of position on the pivot or 

 fork on which it bends. The British cavalry ride very 

 nearly in this position, which, as Sir Francis Head ex- 

 plains, enables them with great facility to cut or give 

 point in front, right or left; and "if they were not 

 embarrassed by their clothing as well as by their 

 accoutrements, and if, as in South America, they were 

 to use no pace but the gallop, each would soon become 

 apparently part and parcel of his horse. But our gal- 

 lant men continue not only hampered and imperilled by 

 a horse-cloak, holsters, and carbine in front of their 

 thighs, and imprisoned, especially round their necks, 

 within tight clothing, but their travelling pace, the trot 

 (a jolting movement unheard of in the plains of South 

 America), gives to their body and limbs a rigidity pain- 

 ful to look at, and in long journeys wearisome to man 

 and horse. Indeed, in the French cavalry, and occa- 

 sionally in our own, the manner in which the soldier, in 

 not a bad attitude, is seen hopping high into the air, on 

 and off his saddle, as his horse, at apparently a different 

 rate, trots beneath, forms as ridiculous a caricature of 

 the art of riding as the pencil of our Punch's * Leech ' 

 could possibly delineate." 



We lately, with compassionate mirth, beheld a regi- 

 ment of hussars thus equestrianising through the streets 

 of Edinburgh ; and certainly the droll look of the thing 

 we have rarely seen exceeded, even in the case of a 

 farmer returning from market in that peculiar style in 

 which a man is said to be " on the outside of his horse," 

 an external appendage connected with the animal in a 

 manner ludicrously unstable. Like everything in na- 

 ture the variety of seats is infinite ; but Sir Francis is 

 unable, with all his cleverness, to account for the pheno- 



