298 The Poets Beasts. 



" A Pothecary on a white horse, 

 Rode by on his vocations, 

 And the Devil thought of his old friend 

 Death in the Revelations." 



But it is reserved for Eliza Cook to speak of " the brave 

 iron-grey," which is Eternity's Arab ! 



The Oriental horse-myths have their exponent in Sir 

 William Jones, whose "green-haired steeds," " with verdant 

 manes," gallop through the skies. "The seven coursers 

 green" of Love and Bounty, "with many an agate hoofed, 

 and pasterns fringed with pearl," and those others, " the 

 steeds of noon's effulgent king, that shake their green manes, 

 and blaze with rubied eyes," are strictly in sympathy with 

 Hindoo tradition. Campbell, on the same theme, wanders, 

 as usual, into sunless skies of error. 



Of horses more specifically, historically, individual, there 

 is a multitude, of course. Starting from the commence- 

 ment, there is the wild Scythian, supposed (by Phineas 

 Fletcher) to drink the blood of the horse he is riding — 

 "yet worse! this fiend makes his own flesh his meat" — 

 and the horses of ancient tradition, such as that "wondrous 

 horse of brass on which the Tartar king did ride ; " and so 

 we pass, through the classic steeds of Greece and Rome, 

 the steeds of Caesar and Alexander, to those of mediaeval 

 heroes, Arthur and the Cid ; and so along the picketed 

 lines of Rhenish steeds, knightly coursers, and milk-white 

 palfreys of the old-ballad age, to the horse of Mazeppa, and 

 the Tartar steeds of the revolt of Islam. 



The horses of St. Mark and of Pharaoh, of which Miriam 

 sang when she went up before the host, with all the women 

 with timbrels and dances — of Darius, which neighed him 

 into the throne of I'ersia — of Diomed, anthropophagous 

 brutes, " Thracian steeds with human carnage wild" — 



" Which fell Geryon nursed, their food 

 The flesh of man, their drink his blood" 



