Field Marshals in the Row. 239 



Lord Chesterfield survived these, and almost all the gay companions of his youth. Sharing 

 neither the accomplishments, nor the wit, nor the wisdom of D'Orsay and Sefton, he retained 

 to the last, when " time had thinned his flowing locks," a style of grand and graceful courtesy 

 which reminded one of the grand seigneurs of the Court of Louis Ouatorze. 



The Earl of Chesterfield has one claim to be remembered in every history of the modern 

 horse. He established the first pack of foxhounds at Rome, and gave the Italian nobility a 

 taste for horses that could gallop and jump. The improvement— it may be said the transformation 

 —of the dull Roman and Neapolitan parade-horse into a creature of life and courage dates 

 from Lord Chesterfield's winter in Rome. 



I describe these three men, " the admired of all admirers " in that day, because they 

 were types of a class utterly extinct and impossible in this generation. 



Contemporary with the top-booted squires and the dandies tittuping up and down the 

 Row, the toes of their varnished boots (a new invention) just touching their stirrups, were 

 to be seen distinguished soldiers, survivors of the great Continental wars — the Marquis of 

 Anglesea, Field Marshal Lord Combermere, who at seventy years rode still like a young 

 man (he lived to be ninety) and the Marquis of Londonderry— all distinguished cavalry generals, 

 and living examples of the almost forgotten, if not lost, as far as England is concerned, haute 

 ecole, the high school of horsemanship. Of the three, the Marquis of Anglesea, a tall," thin, 

 elegant man, on his celebrated thoroughbred charger Pearl, presented in spite of his cork 

 leg, the finest example of the " balanced seat," horse and horseman both perfect, a very 

 triumph of art. All three generals, as they rode along, passaging and piaffing, evidently demanded 

 the admiration they deserved. No British general officer of the present day, however accom- 

 plished, would venture on such exhibitions of horsemanship, out of a riding school. It is 

 related that the Marquis of Anglesea once cantered his horse nineteen times round the corner 

 from Piccadilly to Albemarle Street, and was not satisfied with his horse's performance until 

 the nineteenth time. 



The Duke of Wellington, although educated at the military school of Angers in France, 

 which was noted for its fine manege, never shared the taste of his companions-in-arms for parade 

 chargers and high-school horsemanship. The thoroughbred chestnut Copenhagen, which carried 

 him so stoutly at Waterloo, was, according to Lord Francis Egerton, "a very pretty horse," 

 without any parade action— it was only 15 hands high. The horse the Duke preferred during 

 the last twenty years of his life was a hunter class of animal, a good walker, ridden in a 

 snaffle-bridle, like a huntsman's horse, without a thought of showing off the animal's paces. 

 Before age had bent him his seat was remarkably upright ; lost in thought, he passed along, 

 mechanically acknowledging with his upraised forefinger the many hats raised to salute the 

 Great Duke. The Duke, with the Marquis of Anglesea, were the two who accompanied the 

 Champion as Esquires at the coronation of George IV. 



As he grew old and infirm, instead of bending forward like most old men, he leant back, 

 literally hung on by the bridle, generally going down St. James's Park to the Horse Guards at 

 a huntsman's shog-trot. 



The duke could not bear to be helped to do anything he thought he could do himself. 

 Haydon, the artist, who visited him at Walmer Castle to paint his portrait, says in his Journal — 

 "The Duke told me he brushed his own coat, and would like to black his own boots." In the 

 same spirit, the Duke's groom had a very difficult task in assisting him to mount when he 

 grew very feeble without his Grace finding him out. 



Amongst the statesmen of the departed generation, Sir Robert Peel was certainly, if not 



