OPERATION OF DOCKING. 79 



essential to his comfort, well-being, and personal 

 beauty, although no longer prehensile, as was that of 

 his prehistoric ancestor? 



" Undoubtedly, notwithstanding the efforts of a 

 silly fashion to prove the contrary. It is certainly 

 past finding out how any lover of the symmetrical 

 can be approvingly silent, when he witnesses a pro- 

 cession of thoroughbreds, shorn of this most neces- 

 sary of Nature's equipments, but otherwise glorious 

 to behold! In the horse. Nature revels in Hogarth's 

 line of beauty. Starting at his ears she brings her 

 curve about his neck, gently undulating it at his 

 shoulder and along his back, and gracefully bending 

 it about his haunches, so to describe a profile, of 

 which a swaying tail is an artistic necessity." 



I agree with you, for whoever saw a picture by 

 Schreyer or Fromentin, or De la Roche, or Rosa Bon- 

 heur, wherein these distinguished artists, who have 

 studied and know the beauties of the animal, would 

 consent to depict him after the performance of this 

 brutal operation ! I am sure the question of prefer- 

 ence can never be given to the ridiculous bob-tails, 

 who lift the abbreviated remnant of their hind-quar- 

 ters like a pompon, absurdly suggestive of a certain 

 fashion in bonnets, or hold it down closel}^ as if 

 ashamed of it; but to those who still possess what 

 Nature so emphatically designed and intended they 

 sliould have. 



"Ah, but it is the moneyed classes who give the 

 cue to the horse-using world, and who find it easier 

 to copy an inhuman abuse, than to enlighten fashion- 

 able Goths." 



