56 G Report upon the Exhibition of Horses at Kilhurn. 
the Ro^al Agricultural Society of England has, in addition, 
substantial reasons for remembering the exceptional " severity " 
— the word in this connection is Lord Byron's — of a summer 
during which its Council and Members resolved to inaugurate a 
Show, the greatest, most diversified, and all-embracing that had 
ever been attempted in this or any other country, with a view to 
arresting the attention of farmers. The capital of the British 
Empire, justly regarded as the heart of this terrestrial globe, was 
selected as the site upon which this unprecedented enterprise 
should take shape and form ; but such was the difficulty of finding 
an area of one hundred acres uncrossed by a footpath in the 
outskirts of London, that, despite its clay soil, Kilburn was 
pitched upon as the only available spot. There is little wit and 
less wisdom in exclaiming, as so many journalists with ex post facto 
sagacity have taken delight in doing, that the peculiar tenacity 
of the London clay, upon which Kilburn stands, rendered the 
site singularly inappropriate for the intended purpose. The 
truth is, that not only would Kilburn not have been selected had 
it been foreseen what manner of a June and of a July were in 
store for us, but that the " International Agricultural Exhibition " 
would, in contemplation of so remarkable a summer, have been 
bodily and altogether postponed until a more convenient season. 
The manufacturers of ponderous machinery and of agricultural 
implements, infinitely varied in shape and structure, but weigh- 
ing in some instances tons upon tons of avoirdupois, are doubt- 
less under the impression that the unparalleled rains which fell 
in June militated more disadvantageously against their interests 
and pockets than against those of the owners of stock — equine, 
bovine, porcine, and ovine — who had but to drive their animals 
on the hoof through the glutinous mud instead of dragging 
steam-threshers and tramway waggons across the Slough of 
Despond. But the truth is, that, once lodged under the protect- 
ing canvas, machinery, being inanimate and nerveless, was 
insusceptible of temporary deterioration ; whereas, on the other 
hand, the horses — than which, man alone excepted, there is no 
more highly strung and sensitively organized animal — betrayed 
at once the effects upon their coats, upon the lustre of their speak- 
ing and often interrogating eyes, and upon their general well- 
being, produced by incarceration in an unfamiliar wooden hut, 
under the depressing circumstances depicted in that misery- 
breathing line from the Poet Laureate's pen, of which the scene 
is laid " in the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on 
the roof." 
It would be easy to mention many instances in which the 
horses exhibited at Kilburn showed their susceptibility to the 
" skyey influences " which redounded to their disadvantage. For 
