O THE HORSE. 



were generally Italian or French. Those, indeed, 

 were sufficiently barbarous and unenlightened ; our 

 native artists inconceivably so, when the length of 

 time is considered through which their art had been 

 in universal practice in all its branches. The number 

 of old farrying and veterinary writers was great ; in- 

 deed, certain of them of eminent classical attainments, 

 though the names even, of few have reached our days. 

 Dr. Johnson has somewhere remarked on the vast 

 number of writers of that class, who published in the 

 reign of James the First. The subsequent course 

 of improvement seems to have been confined to the 

 saddle-horse, to the racer, hunter, and hack; at least, 

 with respect to symmetry and activity, with some ex- 

 ception in favour of the cart-horse. The improvement 

 of our coach, troop-horses, and chargers, was in idea, 

 and in its actual commencement about sixty years 

 since, when the generality of them were of a gross, 

 heavy, and inactive breed. And the present writer 

 well remembers Sir Robert Rich's heavy plug-tailed 

 dragoon horses, with his formidable black drummers ; 

 and also the stage-coach horses of similar descrip- 

 tion, a set of which travelled gallantly, with a jee- 

 who-it ! and a crack of the whip, full fifty miles 

 between six a. m., and eight p. m. But he suspects 

 the present Lord Mayor of London (Venables, 1828) 

 in one of his merry stories at the Mansion House, 

 must have made a chronological mistake in the ac- 

 count of his travel from Maidstone, at the above slow 

 rate, so lately as 1780, with the facetious additions 

 of taking leave of friends at the set out. Those 

 laughable incidents belong to a much earlier period ; 



