42 THE HOR8K, 



thoroughbred ; and that there is, i^robably, now in England no 

 breed or family wiiatever, entirely without mixture, in some 

 greater or less degree — some, of coui'sc, infinitesimally small — 

 of thorough blood, \inless it be the dray-horse and the Scottish 

 pony. 



There is constantly going on a prodigious quantity of that, 

 which Mr. Carlisle is pleased to designate as inarticulate howling^ 

 over the decline of the good old English hunter, the excellent 

 old English roadster, and, in a word, of every thing that is old 

 in the way of horse-flesh. 



All this is, in my opinion, the merest of stupidity — precisely 

 on a par with the regret, expressed by some wiseacres, for the 

 decline of the good old English squires, of the days of the first 

 Georges — the riders of these identical excellent old English 

 roadsters and hunters, concerning whose loss illce lachrymce. 

 These good old English squires, be it observed, en jxissant, were 

 generally ignorant, stolid, besotted, and brutal, to a degree com- 

 parable to nothing which exists in any class, however abject, of 

 the present day, that is not positively vicious. 



Rising at four o'clock in the morning, in the saddle and trail- 

 ing the fox to his kennel before six, they plodded along through 

 mud and fallow, on great hairy-fetlocked brutes, as coarse, and 

 slow, and uneducated as themselves, for eight or ten mortal 

 honrs ; they adjourned from the saddle to the dining-room ; 

 whence, gorged with half-raw beef and venison, besotted with 

 October and punch, roaring out stupid or obscene songs, through 

 an atmosphere reeking with tobacco-smoke, they were carried 

 off, by nine at the latest, by their clownish servants, only less 

 drunk than their masters, to their beds, there to snore off the 

 evening's debauch ; and thence, on the next morning, by a repe- 

 tition of the past day's exercise, to earn an appetite for the next 

 evening's revel. 



And this no casual occurrence, no picture of an accidental 

 or occasional lapse of a minority, but the daily habitude, during 

 seven or eight months of the year, of nine-tenths of the resident 

 rural pif>prietors of this good old England, from the times of 

 Queen Anne nearly to the commencement of the present cen- 

 tury. 



During those dark and corrupt ages, the basest and most dis- 



