THE HORSE. i?5 



ampton. 1 Horncastle Fair, held between the icth and zoth 

 of August, was for long the most celebrated for all kinds of 

 horses. But the plough has rather spoilt the Lincolnshire breed, 

 once the first in the world for hunters, both in quantity and 

 quality ; the hunters bred there are still wonderfully good, but 

 there are not so many of them, and Howden, in the East Riding 

 of Yorkshire, where the fair begins on September 25 and lasts 

 for fourteen days, has rather usurped the fame of Horncastle. 

 At Newcastle-on-Tyne, in August and October, and at Rugeley, 

 in Staffordshire, in the first week in June, there is also much 

 buying and selling of horseflesh. At Cahirmee, in county Cork, 

 there is a well-known fair in July, and one at Ballinasloe, in 

 county Galway, in October. Whyte-Melville maintains that 

 ' handsome, clever, hunting-like animals, fit to carry thirteen 

 stone, and capital jumpers, at reasonable prices, varying from 

 one to two hundred pounds,' are still far more plentiful in Ireland 

 than in England. He adds this too : ' They possess also the 

 merit of being universally well-bred. Till within a few years, 

 there was literally no cart-horse blood in Ireland. The " black- 

 drop" of the ponderous Clydesdale remained positively un- 

 known ; and although the Suffolk Punch has been recently in- 

 troduced, he cannot yet have sufficiently tainted the pedigrees 

 of the country, to render us mistrustful of a golden-coated 

 chestnut, with a round barrel and a strong back.' 



But buying a hunter first-hand at a fair is, of course, a tre- 

 mendous lottery even for the keenest and most practised eye. 

 Even if your eye tell you true, if the material is got ready to 

 your hand, there is the making it up. Ready-made hunters are 

 not bought at fairs. The farmers go there to pick up promising 

 three- or four-year olds, giving from 8o/. to i2o/. for them, hoping 

 after a year's schooling or so, either at their own or a breaker's 

 hands, to sell again at a good profit. The dealers go there not 

 so much to buy as to see what is bought, to mark the likely ones 

 down, and be able to lay hands on them afterwards when the 

 hour ccmes and the man. But if you go into the lottery yourself 



1 The Hunter: a Discourse of Horsemanship, 1685. 



