1 68 HUNTING. 



days, a cross between the thorough-bred, or perhaps not quite 

 thorough-bred, horse and the common draught mare, was con- 

 sidered good enough to produce hunters equal to the speed of the 

 hounds then used. There was not such an abundance of what may 

 be termed the intermediate variety of the horse in the country 

 'pretty well bred on each side of the head' which has of late 

 years been in demand for the fast coaches of England, in which 

 low-bred horses have no chance to live. Mares of this variety, 

 put to thorough-bred stallions, and their produce crossed with pure 

 blood, create the sort of animal that comes now under the de- 

 nomination of the half-bred English hunter, or cocktail. 1 



This question of blood has always been a vexed one among 

 hunting men. Dick Christian has decided pithily as usual in 

 their favour. ' Give me 'em lengthy, short-legged for Leister- 

 shire ; I wouldn't have 'em no bigger than fifteen-three : great 

 rump, hips, and hocks ; fore-legs well afore them, and good 

 shoulders ; thorough-bred if you can get them, but none of your 

 high short horses. Thorough- bred horses make the best hunters. 

 I never heard of a great thing yet but it was done by a thorough- 

 bred horse.'' 2 Whyte-Melvilie, too, held by the same creed. 3 ' In 

 all the qualities of a hunter,' he says, ' the thorough bred horse 

 is, I think, superior to the rest of his kind.' He adds, however, 

 'though undoubtedly the best, I cannot affirm that they are 

 always \hepleasantest mounts. The horse he had in his eye is 

 not one bred expressly for hunting but a cast-off from a racing 

 stable, one found not fast enough to be worth training, or rather 

 one whose 'distance is found to be just short of half a mile,' 

 one who ' fails under the strain on wind and frame, of galloping 

 at its very best, eight hundred and seventy yards, and fades into 

 nothing in the next ten.' This failure in his opinion is a 

 question more of speed than stamina: ' There is a want of reach 

 or leverage somewhere, that makes its rapid action too laborious 

 to be lasting, but there is no reason why the animal that comes 

 short of five furlongs on the trial ground, should not hold its 

 own in front, for five miles of a steeplechase, or fifteen of a run 



1 Quarterly Review, March 1832. 2 Silk and Scarlet, ch. i. 



3 Riding Recollections, ch. x. 



