THE LIFE OF A SPORTSMAN 317 



strongly corroborative of what I have asserted, which I 

 lately received from one of them to my remark, that a 

 leader in his team trotted along before the bars, doing 

 little beyond carrying her harness. ' She cannot work, 

 Sir John,' said her coachman ; ' there is nothing left in 

 her but a good heart, and I do not like to whip that out 

 of her.' I made no reply ; but I silently put up a prayer, 

 that neither the head nor the heart of that man might 

 ache on this side of eternity, and that the humane 

 expression would be found booked to his credit on the 

 other." 



" You have advocated your cause ably," said Goodall ; 

 " and although no coachman myself, I can neither discern 

 folly, nor anything approaching to impropriety, in gentle- 

 men driving their own coaches, and entering scientifically 

 into the pursuit, as others do by that of the turf. All 

 that I have read on the subject upholds them. If the 

 Athenians, for example, the most polished nation of all 

 antiquity, deemed it a feather in their caps to be esteemed 

 skilful charioteers, why should Englishmen consider it a 

 disgrace ? Does not Homer make nis Nestor the wisest 

 man and the best coachman of his day ? Does he not 

 make Priam put, with his own hands, his own horses to the 

 car in which himself and the herald demand the body of 

 Hector ? Is he not blamed, indeed, for dwelling upon 

 the description of Juno's chariot, whilst his reader 

 expects him to lead him into the thickest of the 

 battle 1 



1 For why should Homer deck the gorgeous car, 

 When our raised souls are eager for the war! 

 Or dwell on every wheel, when loud alarms, 

 And Mars, in thunder, call the hosts to arms ? ' 



But is he not so minutely faithful to this part of his 

 subject, that, at the funeral games of Patroclus, he re- 

 presents Menelaus borrowing one of the horses of 

 Agamemnon (.Ethe, by name, I think) to put to his 

 chariot with his own ? Has not the sublimest poet that 

 ever dipped pen into ink immortalized the coachman 

 in song 1 ? Allow me, then, to propose that we drink 

 a bumper to ' Success to the Road ! and to all who 

 patronise and support it.'" 



" With all my heart," said the host. 



" And with all mine," said Mr. Warburton, uncle to the 



