24 ENGLISH DONKIES AND GERMAN POSTBOYS. 



among the number. In an ordinary way he certainly 

 gets coarser fare and harder blows than the horse : 

 but as to his fare, it is well known he would leave the 

 hay of the race-horse for the first thistle he could get 

 hold of; and as to the blows, I must in candour allow 

 that in very many cases it " sarves him right." That 

 there is a difference in the dispositions of these animals 

 is beyond doubt, but much less so than in perhaps those 

 of most other animals that come under our immediate 

 observation. With a sluggish one, feed him as you 

 may, work him as little as you may, he will prefer 

 having his sides and quarters visited by an ash plant 

 in the hands of an athletic savage, to accelerating his 

 wonted pace ; and should those strokes be applied 

 with the rapidity of a mountebank playing on a salt- 

 box, a twist to the right or left of his nether parts 

 is generally the only result. Perhaps he goes upon 

 the principle of the schoolboy: "If I learn A, which 

 I could soon do, they'll make me learn B and all the 

 cross row : " so Jack concludes that if he evinced his 

 perfect understanding of these hints by quickening his 

 walk, a trot would then be demanded, and this he 

 considers " a consummation devoutly " to be avoided. 

 I am quite willing to agree with Sterne, that " with 

 an ass one might converse for ever: so one might 

 with a German postilion : but whoever has had the 

 gratification of riding behind these imperturbable 

 animals must have found, that, converse as long as 

 you will, you will persuade neither the one nor the 

 other to quicken his progression. If we wantonly 

 put any two animals to the same degree of pain, the 

 atrocity of the act is as great in the one case as in the 

 other, and of course the suffering is equal to the ani- 

 mals : but as Jack prefers being bastinadoed to mend- 



