Book II.] TRAINING SECRETS. in 



take your mouth ful of strong Vinegar, and spirt it 

 into your Horses nosethrils, whereof it will search 

 and open his pypes, making them apt for the receite 

 of wind. This done, leade him to the race, and when 

 you come at the end therefore where you must un- 

 cloath him, having the Vinegar carried after you, doo 

 the like there, and so bequeath him and your self to 

 God, and good fortune. Che sera sera'' 



29 Gervase, Gervas, Jarvise, or Jervis, Markham, son 

 of Robert Markham, Esq., of Gotham, county Nottingham, 

 became an author and poet in the reign of Queen Eliza- 

 beth. He appears, says Harte, "to be the first English 

 writer who deserves to be called a hackney writer. All 

 subjects seem to have been alike easy to him : yet as 

 his thefts were innumerable, he has now and then stolen 

 some very good things, and in a great measure preserved 

 their memory from perishing." Sir S. E. Brydges says : — 

 " He seems to have become a general compiler for the book- 

 sellers, and his various works had as numerous impressions 

 as those of Burn and Buchan in our days." " No subject," 

 says Drake, " appears to have been rejected by Markham : 

 husbandry, housewifery, farriery, horsemanship, and mili- 

 taiy tactics, hunting, hawking, fowling, fishing, and archery, 

 heraldry, poetry, romances, and the drama, all shared his 

 attention and exercised his genius and industry." The first 

 of his works, entitled " A Discovrce of Horsmanshippe," was 

 published at London by J[ohn] C[harlewood] for Richard 

 Smith, in 1593. His other writings relating to horses and 

 equine subjects were very numerous, and all the editions of 

 these need not be enumerated here. In 161 6 Markham was 

 tried in the Star Chamber for publishing a libel on Lord 

 Darcy of the North, and was adjudged to pay a heavy fine, " im- 

 prisonment and good behaviour." The quarrel, which took 

 place in the hunting-field at Blith, in June, 1616, arose thus : — 

 Markham had been invited by Sir Gervase Clifton to meet 



