I04 HORSE-SHOES AND HORSE-SHOEING. 



a custom which shows that the early inhabitants of many 

 parts of Europe were horse-loving nations, from whom 

 the noble creature could not be separated, even by death. 

 I allude to the interment of horses with the mighty dead, 

 the fame of whose deeds w^as not allowed to pass to our 

 time, and whose bones, fragments of weapons, or adorn- 

 ment, and the silent evidence of their friendship for the 

 horse, alone remain to denote their having once upon a 

 time existed. To a certain extent, the horse-shoes found 

 in graves are trustworthy testimony to the antiquity of 

 nail-shoeing, and the degree to which it prevailed. 



The practice of burying the horse with his master is 

 extremely ancient, and general to a most wonderful extent. 

 With the Greeks, as with ourselves, horses served to 

 heighten the solemnity of death. Homer tells us, that 

 when the Greeks were mourning for Patroclus, 



Thrice round the dead they drove their sleek-skinn'd steeds^ 

 Mourning ! 



and the body of that warrior being consigned to the 

 flames, 



round the edges of the pyre. 

 Horses and men commix'd. 



In the funeral feasts of his people, which are represented 

 on funeral monuments, the image of a horse's head was 

 usually placed in one corner, as an emblem that death was 

 a journey. 



Among the ancient Germans, the body of the dead 

 warrior was consumed in the flames of a particular kind of 



