2 The Book of the Horse. 



kingdoms and principalities which form the northern portion of the German Empire, in the German 

 dominions of the Austrian Kaiser, as well as in his horse-loving kingdom of Hungary, in the 

 newly-formed Royalty of united Italy, and under the Czar of all the Russias, the English blood- 

 horse holds the first place. It may safely be assumed that at the great Continental reviews — 

 where emperors and kings, reigning dukes and famous military commanders, appear on horse- 

 back surrounded by their brilliant staffs — nine-tenths of the chargers ridden by the more dis- 

 tinguished personages have been bred in England, or are the immediate produce of English sires. 



All the best horses in the United States are directly descended from English thorough-breds, 

 with a slight intermixture of Barbs or Arabs. Experts belonging to the great Anglo-Sa.xon repub- 

 lic trace back the pedigrees of their best trotters — the speciality of American horse-breeding — to 

 Messenger, an imported blood sire, the son of grey Mambrino, who was bred by Lord Grosvenor, 

 and painted by the celebrated George Stubbs, about 1774.* 



It has been reserved for our colonists in South Africa and Australia to prove that the 

 English blood-horse, unpampered, and trained for the purpose, while far exceeding the Arab 

 in size and general utility, can equal him in endurance and the power of completing great 

 distances in journeys extending over many successive days. 



"The reason why" of the extraordinary success of the English as breeders, as originators, 

 almost manufacturers, of a new tribe of blood-horses, is to be found not only in a favourable 

 soil and climate, but in the general partiality of the English people for a country life, and 

 their universal passion for everything connected with horses. 



In no other civilised country are so many men, women, and children, in proportion to its 

 population, to be found fond of riding and driving. Our equestrians are not confined to a 

 privileged class, a military caste, or a select few of the upper ten thousand votaries of fashion ; 

 riding and driving are essentially English national amusements. In making this wide assertion 

 no comparison is intended to be made with the nomadic inhabitants of countries where a 

 horse is as much a necessary of life as a pair of stilts in the French Landcs or a pair of 

 snow-shoes for winter use in the Canadian backwoods ; nor, again, with the inhabitants of the great 

 cattle-feeding plains of South America — where the men are true Centaurs, and where a mere child 

 may be seen mounted, driving cattle, carrying an infant before him on the pommel of the 

 saddle as he gallops over the smooth, stoneless pampas — nor, lastly, with the semi-oriental families 

 of herdsmen on the rolling pastures of Poland and Hungary, the nurseries of the world-famous 

 Polish lancers and Hungarian hussars. 



Still less is it my intention to assume that first-class horsemen or first-class coachmen are 

 only to be found in England. That was the vulgar error of a departed generation, which 

 rarely travelled, and knew no language but its own, with which every foreigner was a French- 

 man, and which took its idea of a Johnny Crapaud from the caricatures of Gilray and Rowlandson. 



In the Crimea our men learned to respect the Chasseurs d'Afrique, who charged the Russian 

 batteries at Balaclava to save their English allies. The deeds of the German cavalry are still 

 green in our memories. For my own part, I have seen Russians and Austrians, Hanoverians 

 and Hungarians, ride across a stiff summer-baked country in a style and with a determination 

 that would not have disgraced the best of our own officers at the Windsor or Rugby military 

 steeple-chases. And it must be remembered that these gentlemen have not, as we have in 

 our hunting-fields, a training ground perpetually open to them from their earliest years. 



* A portrait of Mambrino, from Stubbs' painting in the possession of the Duke of Westminster, by liis Grace's permission, 

 is one of the coloured illuslralions of this wurli. 



