TURKISH HOKSES IN ENGLAND. 95 



I cannot, myself, perceive wlierefore the rejection of this Arab 

 should be charged, as it generally appears now to be, as an 

 error, against the Marquis of Newcastle, the same who gallant- 

 ly commanded for the king at Marston Moor, and would have 

 won for him his battle, and perhaps his crown, but for the mad 

 and selfish impetuosity of Kupert. 



This is, however, nothing to the point, however much it may 

 be so that he was considered the best horseman and the best 

 judge of horses of his day, and that he has left, as a legacy to 

 posterity and a bounty to all those who love that noble animal, 

 incomparably the best old English work on the horse. 



It is now pretty generally admitted that, whether Barb, 

 Turk, Syrian, or Arab of the desert proper, all oriental blood 

 has had its share and influence in reinvigorating the blood of 

 the English thoroughbred, and giving to it those peculiar qual- 

 ities which cause it, with justice, at this day, to be esteemed 

 the best, completest, and most perfect animal in the world. 



In what degree these animals have ministered to our now 

 dominant strain, is by no means to be ascertained ; but it is to 

 be noted that most of the early imported foreign stallions were 

 not Eastern Arabs. 



During the protectorate, Oliver Cromwell, who, though he 

 was compelled by the necessity of conciliating the absurd pre- 

 judices of the Puritans, to forbid racing, was yet an ardent 

 lover of the horse, and an earnest promoter and j)atron of all 

 that belongs to horsemanship, purchased of Mr. Place, after- 

 wards his stud-master, the celebrated " White Turk " — still re- 

 corded as the most beautiful south-eastern horse ever brought 

 into England, and the oldest to which our present strain refers. 

 To him succeeds Yilliers, duke of Buckingham, his Helmsley 

 Turk, and to him Fairfax's — the same great statesman and 

 brave soldier, who fought against Newcastle at Marston — Mo- 

 rocco Barb. 



And to these three horses. it is that the English race-horse of 

 the old time chiefly owes its purity of blood, if we except the 

 royal mares., specially imported by Charles II., to which it is — 

 mythically, rather than justly — held that all English blood 

 should trace. 



Of all succeeding importations, those, which are principally 



