The C0AC//-//0KSES BEFORE Railroads. 



245 



The English coach-horse arrived at perfection as a powerful well-bred animal, with really 

 fine moving action, early in the present century, under two influences— the high roads constructed 

 for the mail-coaches, and the wide distribution of thoroughbred sires, which it was part of 

 the dignity of every local magnate to keep and to bretd, in order to be represented at 

 county races. A portrait of a carriage-horse, by Benjamin Marshall, the property of Henry 

 Villebois, Esq., engraved in " Laurence's Delineations of the Horse, 1810," is as fine a specimen 

 of a powerful blood wheeler as could be found in any modern coach, although disfigured by 

 cropped ears and a tail closely docked. 



Before stao-e-coach travelling and posting were brought to the perfection which was 

 extinguished with the coaches and the horses by the railway system, every great landed 

 gentleman, peer, or squire, kept a large stud of coach-horses, and performed all journeys within 



'^1^^^ 



A WHITE HANOVERIAN LEADER. 



a hundred miles, certainly all within fifty, with his own horses. Great noblemen travelled 

 from Northumberland, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cheshire, with their own horses, by easy 

 stages. A squire of two or three thousand a year, in the midland or northern counties, did 

 not consider his stable furnished without five or six full-sized, well-bred coach-horses. Noblemen 

 counted this part of their studs by the score. The heads of the noble families— like the Duke 

 of Northumberland, Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Darlington, the Earl of Derby, Earl Grosvenor, 

 and the Duke of Portland— seldom rode out in their carriages with less than four horses and 

 as many outriders. If they visited the local race-course, six horses were attached to the family 

 coach. These horses were in greater part bred by themselves. The favourite race-horses of 

 these great noblemen, when removed to the stud, covered the half-bred mares of their tenants 

 and neighbours at nominal fees. 



Thus in 1780 one of the most famous horses of the day was the Earl of Derby's Sir Peter 

 Teazle, of which Sir Charles Bunbury wrote, when he first arrived a colt at Newmarket, " Lord 

 Derby has sent a coach-horse here ; " shortly afterwards, " The coach-horse can gallop ; " a 



