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The Poets Beasts. 



fattens the horse;" "For want of a nail the shoe is lost 

 for want of a shoe the horse is lost : for want of a hors 

 the rider is lost;" "The horse thinks one thing, and h 

 that saddles him another ; " " Speed without pains, a horse. 

 These must suffice. Cowper uses the metaphor " pad 

 horse constancy," and Churchill, though with deficier 

 skill, utilises the colt as a simile for " loose Digression, 

 that " spurning connection and her formal yoke, bound 

 through the forest and wanders far astray." The colt, ir 

 deed, furnishes an analogy to many things and persons thj 

 depreciate it,- for the poets too often forget that, after al 

 innocence in the young beast sets it quite apart from th 

 deliberate obliquities of reasoning humanity. 



