BAKB 'VS. ARAB. 97 



All this being considered, and especially tlie fact that there 

 is more Turk and Barb than real Arabian blood in the present 

 race, when it is admitted also that ISTewcastle was a consummate 

 horseman, I think it quite as well to hear what he has to say for 

 himself, and not to continue uttering, what Mr. Carlyle would 

 call inarticulate howls over what cannot, at all events, now be 

 helped, and perhaps was not any harm in the beginning. 



" I never saw," says he, ed. of 1667, p. 73, " but one of these 

 horses, which Mr. John Markham, a merchant, brought over, 

 and said he was a right Arabian. He was a bay, but a little 

 horse, and no rarity for shape, for I have seen many English 

 horses far finer. Mr. Markham sold him to King James for five 

 hundred pounds, and being trained up for a course, when he 

 came to run, every horse beat him." 



Of this statement, Mr. Youatt, who decides ex cathedra that 

 the Marquis's opinion was " probably altogether erroneous " — 

 one does not see why so, unless because, on all other points, it 

 is almost invariably sound — makes quite a diiferent one, ascrib- 

 ing to the old writer a dictum, which he uses not, namely, that 

 " this Arabian was a little hony horse." The introduction of the 

 word hony, carries much with it ; so much that in all likeli- 

 hood, if the horse had been bony, the Marquis might have 

 held a different opinion concerning the propriety of breeding 

 from him. 



As it is, we can only hold that his view was a correct one ; 

 the horse when tried could not run, and when examined as to 

 form was found inferior. For these causes, he was ruled out as 

 a stock getter. So would any horse be ruled out to-day, if he 

 were an Arab bearing visibly on his forehead the seal of King 

 Solomon himself, or if he were an English thoroughbred, de- 

 scended, through all the time-honored magnates of the Turf, 

 from that most unimpeachable of all attainable ends, an im- 

 ported Eastern sire, and a royal mare. 



It is, I think, worthy of notice, that Newcastle, who was a 

 scholar, a travelled man, an observer and a gentleman, as well as 

 a soldier and a horseman, distinctly records his preference of the 

 Spanish horse to any other strain of blood existing in his time, 

 and in doing so directly refers to the Barb, for service, though 

 not in those terms, as a racing stallion. And it is observable, 

 Vol. I.— 7. 



