A Rw/NG L/cssox /■xw Adults. 



257 



According to rule, if you want to learn German you engage a German tutor ; if you 

 want to learn to dance, you subscribe to Mr. Turveydrop's dancing academy ; but if you 

 want to learn to ride, you generally find a Procrustean system in force which is the same 

 whether you are a boy, or a full-grown man, or recruit who has enlisted in a cavalry regiment 

 to escape a wife or spite a sweetheart. 



Any one clever at other athletic sports may be thirty years old, and yet easily acquire the 

 essential parts of horsemanship ; but it is not to men of well-exercised muscles, in hard condition, 



COUNT d'oKSAY (Al'TER A.N OIL SKETCH BY bIK i'KANClS GRANT, I.N SIR RICHARD WALLACE'S COLLECTION, ABOUT 183O.) 



that these lines arc addressed. They are meant for the student who has lived in his books 

 until type melts before his eyes in one confusing haze ; for members of the learned profession 

 who have worked so hard in climbing to the top of the tree that they feel no longer able 

 either to balance themselves there or hold on by the branches ; to money-making geniuses, 

 who have been so successful that they are no longer able to enjoy anything that money can 

 buy. 



As a matter of course, the simplest plan for carrying out Dr. M.D.'s advice, "horse 

 exercise," is to subscribe to a riding-school. Advertisements appear daily in the London 

 papers offering to teach riding in twelve lessons for two guineas. Those who accept the invita- 

 tion have no reason to complain even if they do not feel themselves competent to undertake 

 11 II 



