80 
JURISPRUDENCE. 
eral horses at a fair and takes a warranty; when he gets them to 
London, if he thinks lie has made a bad bargain in any one of them 
—given too much money for the horse—he gets a man to examine 
him and find some defect lie construes into unsoundness. He then 
sends a certificate down to the person in the country from whom 
he bought the horse. The breeder, a farmer, writes back to say 
fc he was perfectly sound when he left him,’ the correspondence 
goes on, and the dealer writes to say he shall send the horse back 
on such a day or else send him to be sold. Frequently, to save 
expense, and frightened at the cost of a lawsuit, the farmer says, 
‘if you will keep the horse, you can have him for half the origi¬ 
nal price.’ There are hundreds of these cases.” The same 
author, on the authority of Mr. E. Green, M.P., relates a case in 
which a London dealer bought a horse in Lincoln fair and gave a 
high price for him. The usual letter came down, saying the 
horse was unsound. The whole county backed their friend, and 
the farmer defended the action. They employed a detective to 
worm out the secrets of the dealer’s place, and found that he 
had made £1500 by letters of this kind, because many men, 
rather than have any bother, w'ould send him £20 or £30. The 
dishonesty of the horsedealer is proverbial, even from the 
earliest times; an old writer says, “ as mortar sticketh between 
stones, so sticketh fraud between buyers and sellers of horses.” 
Butler, the author of Hudibras, says: “A horse-dealer is one 
who reads horses, and understands all the virtues and vices of the 
whole species. He makes his first application to a horse, as some 
lovers do to a mistress, with special regard to eyes and legs. He 
has more ways to hide decays in horse-flesh than women have 
decays in faces, with which oaths and lies are the most common 
accompaniments. He understands the chronology of a horse’s 
mouth most critically, and will find out the year of his nativity 
by it as critically as if he had been at the mare’s labor that bore 
him; and he is a strict observer of saints’ days, only for the 
fairs that are kept on them.” I quite agree with Nimrod, who 
says, “ there is a good deal to be said in mitigation of the general 
opinion, that an honest horse-dealer is a character written in the 
dust;” and there is a saying amongst the fraternity that helps to 
