418 BREEDING OF HUNTERS AND HACKS. 
less warranted than the supposition that the Englisii race¬ 
horse has deteriorated in strength or endurance. If you 
begin galloping him at a year and a lialf old, to wear him 
out in running and trying ’’ before he is three years old, 
and his limbs set and his frame furnished, this is no proof of 
all he might have been had his- powers been husbanded, like 
those of his ancestors, any of which, under like circum¬ 
stances, he would have fairly distanced over a four-mile 
course. Pace is now the password of the chase, and the best 
hunters in Leicestershire, either for fencing, weight-canwing, 
or stoutness, are, and long have been, purely thorough-bred. 
These are the horses that make money, and next to these the 
three-parts-bred, by a thorough-bred stallion out of a well- 
bred mare. 
But Jonas Webb, even at the acme of his success, culled 
his rams, and many a shorthorn that we never see has, like 
BrummeFs neckcloths, been fastidiously put aside as a 
failure.With the thorough-bred horse, however, it is not 
so; here, unfortunately, there are no failures. Those of the 
highest degree go to our famous turf studs, to serve at their 
fifty or thirty guineas; others of almost equal excellence are 
eagerly bought up for the foreign market, while many of a 
similar stamp are put at prices varying from ten to twenty 
guineas. Such horses are all beyond the farmer^s reach; 
but instead of looking for something in the next degree— 
and that, without the charge for mere fashion or high per¬ 
formance, might well answer the object—our breeder is too 
often content with the very worst of cast-offs. People who 
live by travelling stallions are not often men of much capital, 
and they go, as a consequence, more for a cheap horse than 
a good one. With a flaming card of all a great-grandsire 
has done, or what this very horse may have accomplished 
over a short course at a light weight, they associate an 
animal whose appearance alone should condemn him— 
narrow, weedy, and leggy, with scarcely a point in his favour 
for getting hunters, and very possibly full of all sorts of 
defects, natural and otherwise. The fee still is a small one, 
and so the mischief is done. A man pays twenty-five shillings 
where five guineas would have been a saving, and the thorough- 
- bred horse gets a bad name, plainly and very palpably, if a 
customer would only make use of his eyes, from being un¬ 
fairly represented. Considering the infinity of good or evil 
they are capable of producing, it is really a question whether 
horses should ever be allowed to travel without a license, the 
more particularly when we see how few people take the 
trouble to judge for themselves. It is said that every En- 
