248 



The Book of the Horse. 



them to purchase suitable animals, even as small as 14 hands 3 inches, of the right style 

 and action. 



About the year i860 the great job-masters of London thought that they had discovered a 

 mine of wealth in purchasing the largest class of carriage-horses in Holstein, Mecklenburg, 

 Hanover, and North Germany generally ; all countries whose war-horses werj famous in the 

 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These carriage-horses were for the most part the pro- 

 duce of crosses between English sires and German mares. They had imposing fore-hands and 

 high action, and they were twenty-five per cent, cheaper than English geldings of the same 

 size. One of the greatest job-masters, in the course of a tour made for the purpose, purchased 

 several hundred pairs. After a trial extending over more than ten years, the result is pro- 



CLEVELAND liAY STATE CARklAGE-lluKSi:. 



nounced not satisfactory. The majority of these German horses showed the defects that 

 Gervase Markham pointed out two hundred and fifty years ago — they were soft. They flourished 

 about very superbly from shop to shop, from street to street, or up and down the drive in 

 Hyde Park ; but if they were wanted to go to Richmond, for instance, the chances were that 

 they could scarcely crawl back again ; " and if they fell sick of influenza, or anything of that 

 kind, they were sure to waste to nothing or die." A dealer and job-master who had had a 

 great many of them through his hands, attributed their softness to the want of corn when 

 between three and four years old, and added, " Most of them, like hearse-horses, have neither 

 arms nor thighs ; " that is to say, are conspicuously deficient in the most important muscles 

 of the motive limbs. Since 1877 a new supply has been opened to job-masters in the horses 

 imported from the United States and Canada. 



The evidence before the Earl of Rosebery's select committee of the House of Lords on 

 the supply of horses, issued in August, 1873, while these pages were passing through the press, 

 contains a mass of valuable information, from which the following passages, bearing especially 

 on this subject, have been condensed. 



