Some Poets' Horses. 299 



— of Nereus, the sea-horses, a very favourite fancy of the 

 poets — of Dan Phoebus — 



" When he doth tighten up the golden reins 

 And paces leisurely down amber plains 

 His snorting four " — 



the air-bred and wind-begotten steeds of Thrace — the 

 winged steeds of Perseus and Endymion, — and all the 

 " other foales of Pegasus, his kynde." So, step by step, pass 

 to Black Besses of the heath and road, the chargers of 

 our Joan-of-Arcs and other warriors of history, of Queen 

 Elizabeth and other sovereigns, to the Rozinantes, Grizzles, 

 and Dobbins, of Cervantes, Hudibras, and S}Titax, to hacks 

 of John Gilpin and the " Parish Doctor," and many a local 

 hero and heroine beside whose jades are the subjects of a 

 passing jest. 



I remember having seen somewhere a picture of Adam, 

 in the garb of Eden, riding a bare-backed mustang, a lion 

 gamboling by his side. But in Holy Writ the horse 

 appears in only one aspect — as the war-horse. '• He saith 

 among the trumpets. Ha ! ha ! and he smelleth the battle 

 afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting." ^ 



In Genesis the name does not occur at all. Nor, as a 

 matter of fact, could it do so, seeing that the first " horse " 

 (the first that science knows of) was a little, five-toed, sharp- 

 nosed creature, much too small for a man of even our 

 degenerate stature to ride upon, and otherwise also unsuit- 

 able for a steed ; and it is, therefore, very probable that 

 " the first man " never was on horseback. 



Yet the use of the animal dates back to a prodigious 

 antiquity. The Assyrian sculptures show us high-bred and 

 carefully-caparisoned chargers, three thousand years and 

 more ago. Nor is it at all likely that they were the first to 



^ Job's splendid poem has incited several poets (Quarles, Young, 

 Broome, for instance) to attempt the same theme, which, however, 

 gains no accession of beauty or power from their paraphrases. 



