HISTORICAL TESTIMONY. 145 



ferior to the breed most commonly cultivated 

 in Yorkshire and Durham which we know as 

 the Short-horn or Durham, and which was then 

 most commonly spoken of as the Teeswater or 

 Holderness breed, from two of the localities 

 in which it was largely bred. We have seen 

 already that the celebrated Longhorn bull 

 Shakespeare was described by a great admirer 

 of that breed as very closely resembling an 

 inferior Holderness bull. This breed for, in- 

 deed, it seems to have possessed for many gen- 

 erations previous to this time a well-defined 

 breed type was bred with care and success by 

 many men of the best character in the North 

 of England, and was already highly valued for 

 its qualities of beef and milk production, when, 

 in the last decade of the eighteenth century, a 

 number of breeders began to apply to them the 

 Bakewell methods. Among these breeders the 

 brothers Robert and Charles Colling have won 

 the place of the greatest fame, owing to their 

 active interest in the new methods, their con- 

 fidence in themselves and in their cattle, their 

 rare capacity for exploiting what they were 

 doing, the real excellence of their results, arid, 

 perhaps quite as much as anything else, to the 

 men into whose hands their cattle passed and 

 who carried on most successfully the work of 

 breeding, and not less that of exploitation in 

 a manner and to a degree that would have 



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