108 ORIGINAL' SOURCES OP TKOTTING BLOOD. 



I find no hesitancy or disagreement among the English authorities ; they 

 all give the pedigree alike. It seems to be the fate of nearly all horses that 

 greatly distinguish themselves, from the days of Sampson and English Eclipse 

 to Ethan Allen and Dexter, [and he might have added Sir Archy], to have 

 their parentage doubted ; these stories generally originate with grooms and 

 stable boys, or with the owners of rival stallions; in this case the story was, 

 that the dam of Sampson had been covered by a cart-horse, and his immense 

 bone and strength seemed to sustain it. 



The editor, who is himself a compiler of pedigrees, might have added 

 that owners sometimes were unwilling to acknowledge a stain in a pedi- 

 gree, and caused a more fashionable but spurious one to go upon the 

 record and come down to ages when it could not be refuted for want 

 of knowledge of facts well known to the cotemporaries of the horse. 



This horse Sampson was foaled in 1745, and was a black horse. His 

 reputed and recorded sire Blaze was a bay; his sire. Flying Childers, 

 was a chestnut> — by which is meant a sorrel; and the Darley Arabian 

 was most likely of the same color. 



The color of his dam is not given, but she was Babboon's dam, by 

 Hip, son of Curwen's bay Barb; and in a family where the prevailing 

 color was bay, g^rey or chestnut, with an occasional brown, a black 

 being very uncommon. 



Godolphin Arabian was a brown, but then as now the bays and 

 chestnuts formed the great majority of the blood horses. 



One of the earliest English writers on the horse, Lawrence, says: 



I am by no means disposed to retract my opinion concerning Robinson's 

 Sampson. Not only did the account of the groom appear to me to be entitled 

 to credit, but the internal evidence of the horse's having had in him a cross 

 of common blood is sufficiently strong by appearance both of the horse him- 

 self and his stock; an idea in which every sportsman, I believe, who remem- 

 bers Engineer, Mambrino and others will agree with me. 



While the thorough])red horse of that day was an animal that 

 scarcely exceeded fourteen hands and two inches, rarely indeed reach- 

 ing fifteen hands, Sampson was fifteen-two, and his measurements are 

 given, accompanied with the statement that he was the largest-boned 

 blood horse that was ever bred. The editor of the monthly above 

 referred to says: 



The question here keeps pressing itself to the front and demanding an 

 answer as to where this great " cart-horse " bone development came from. 

 There is nothing known of any of his ancestors that will justify us in point- 

 ing to this one or that one as transmitting it. 



In Engineer, his son — a brown horse — the same coarseness and 



