16 THE HOKSE. 



beside ; and that tne Royal Spanish horses, from which tire ear- 

 liest English importations were made, were as purely and dis- 

 tinctly of oriental blood, although bred on Spanish soil, as is the 

 English and American race-horse of the present day. 



In that case, and I am myself nearly convinced that so it was, 

 the unknown progenitrixes to which so much speculation has 

 attached, would have been as noble as the noblest stallions to 

 which they bore the champions of the early English Turf, and 

 the parents of our greatest modern winners. One thing is in- 

 disputably certain, that our ancestors in the reign of Charles 

 the First and Charles the Second, were far too well acquainted 

 with the theory and principle of breeding — as is evinced by the 

 writings of Newcastle, and the satires of Bishop Hall, so long 

 before as in the reign of Queen Elizabeth — to put a Flanders or 

 Liucolnsliire coach mare to a horse of higli blood, at a compara- 

 tively high price, in the hope of her progeny turning oat a racer. 



It is idle, therefore, I say, in the last degree, to believe that 

 the unknown progenitrixes of Snake, of Bustler, of Grey Haut- 

 boy, of Grey Grantham, and of Whynot, were, because unknown, 

 ignoble. 



I may almost say, we know that they were not so. First, 

 because the breeders of those capital horses could not, in any 

 ordinary human likelihood, have been so ignorantly stujiid as 

 to breed such mares to the best Turks and Arabs ; and, second, 

 because, by all that the turf-experience of two centuries has 

 taught us, we may be sure that, if they had done so, Snake, and 

 Bustler, and Whynot, and Grey Hautboy, and Grey Grantham, 

 would not have been the result of the ridiculous experiment, 

 but some carriage horses, or, at the best, troopers, of which not 

 a word would have descended to posterity. 



The laws of nature are, save in exceptional cases, immu- 

 table ; and one of the most paramount of these seems to be 

 that which insists, as a consequence, that like must beget like. 



So long ago as in the reign of Augustus Caesar, the first Latin 

 Lyric Poet wrote, not as a fanciful hypothesis, but as an estab- 

 lished principle, 



Fortes creantur fortibus et boni.". 

 Est in juvencis, est in equis, patrum 



Virtus, nee imbellem ferocea 



Progenerant aquils columbam. 



