The Herods. 



171 



THE BYERLY TURK. 



* *Twas here, in Jersey's colours, 



That he viewed his favourite bay, 

 E'en ere he reached the Bushes 



Vanquish Elis and John Day ; 

 'Twas here the dam of Surplice, 



Through light or heavy ground. 

 The "sky-blue" bore triumphantly, 



'Neath many an extra pound." 



MR. GOODWIN, in his Table of 

 Thorough Bred Pedigrees, fixed 

 the advent of this horse at 1689; and seventy years 

 later, we find Herod, the hero of his line, with both 

 Barb and Arab blood in his veins. Weak fore-legs, 

 which were a constitutional failing with him, made 

 him resign the post for the paddock very early in the 

 day. He flourished there under considerable disad- 

 vantages as to keep and care in Sir John Moore's 

 hands, but ere he had reached his sixth grass, both 

 Highflyer and Woodpecker were in his foal-list. 

 Those renowned brood mares, Tuberose and Faith, 

 were also by him ; and the latter, who was the dam 

 of Marcia, kept up an unbroken line of greys for forty 

 years, and foaled to Remembrancer when she was 

 twenty-seven. Marcia, like her half-sister Vesta, was 

 one of the gamest of this rare grey blood, and so light 

 in hand, that, as her trainer Joe Ackroyd used to say, 

 she " wouldn't pull a duck off her nest." Her son, 

 Otho by St. Paul, reckoned Merlin and Doctor 

 Syntax among his Cup victims at Doncaster and 

 Richmond ; and Trajan, a son of Vesta and Delpini, 

 was long remembered in Sir Mark Sykes's hunt, as 

 much by his rare stock, as the style in which he car- 

 ried Tom Carter through many a long day. 



The speedy and lasting particles in sir Peter Teazle. 

 Herod's nature seem in a measure to 

 have severed, and to have descended in a remarkable 



