Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 046.djvu/180

172 in short, a species of slightly mitigated Mantalini, in high life of the year 1193. To us the strongest point of resemblance between Paris and the "fed horse" appears to be (to use, we hope not profanely, the words of the Prophet), that he "neighed after his neighbour's wife." But we are waxing a little bit too classical.

"From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but a step," as every body knows who knows any thing whatever; indeed the quotation is so stale, and the fact so universally admitted, that we should hardly have inflicted it again on the defenceless public, had we thought about the matter, and must trust for our excuse to a certain villanous John-Bullish kind of habit we have, of blurting out whatever comes first into our heads, without stopping to enquire whether it has any business there or not. We met, the other day, with a beautiful pendant to the old Greek's picture, in a passage descriptive of the Bengalee breed of horses, from the pen of a Captain Williamson:—"The said horses," says the facetious son of Mars, "have generally Roman noses, and sharp narrow foreheads; much white in their eyes, ill-shaped ears, square heads, thin necks, narrow chests, shallow girtles, lank bellies, cat hams, goose rumps, and switch tails." The gallant Captain would, we fear, be somewhat puzzled to draw a portrait, merely from such a description as that with which he has favoured us.

We are told that the "new-discovered people of the Indies, when the Spaniards first landed amongst them, had so great an opinion, both of the men and the horses, that they looked upon them as gods, or as animals ennobled above their nature." Well, the poor doomed barbarians went but one step beyond nations who bore, in their time, the palm for civilisation. Horses have received funeral honours, and have had cities called after their names, without exciting any such smile as that with which you just now treated the simple Americans; and, though we do not recollect that they have ever been actually deified, they have, at any rate, enjoyed the highest honours of mortality. What an exquisite piece of satire was that of Caligula, when he nominated his horse to the office of consul! Sheer madness, said you? No, no. Like Hamlet, he "was but mad north-north-west;—when the wind was southerly, he knew a hawk from a hand-saw." Tyrant as he was, he had sanity enough to observe and despise the abject grovelling of the bipeds of Rome, and boldness enough to hold it up to scorn by the appointment of his quadruped favourite. If it were madness, it had method in't. Only fancy the terrors of the patricians in waiting, lest the newly made functionary should take it into his head to stretch his consular hind-leg without giving warning! We once heard a pragmatical young prig of a Cantab (a Johnian, of course) observe, that he must have been a most incorruptible magistrate, for lie answered all improper applications with a nay; and we thought of the dictum of Samuel Johnson, buttoned up our pockets, and made ourselves scarce forthwith.

Paul of Russia was mad, an' you will, when he ordered to be starved the honest horse which had offended only by a stumble: his own end was happier only because more speedy. And as to that king-making and king-deposing Lord of Warwick, who stabbed his war-horse in cold blood before the battle of Towton; for the sake of a nature otherwise noble, it were to be wished he had been so too. You may read how he met with his deserts on the obelisk at Barnet Common.

We have read somewhere of a young French renegade, who confessed to Chateaubriand that he never found himself galloping alone in the desert without a sensation amounting to rapture; and though we cannot speak from personal experience either of "antres vast or deserts idle," we think we can manage to enter into his feelings. Like Montaigne, "we do not willingly alight when we are once on horseback; for it is the place where, whether well or sick, we find ourselves most at ease." We know of nothing more glorious—nothing more inspiriting—nothing which more effectually dispels from one's spirit the glooms, and the mists, and the fogs, which gather round it so thickly in this "working-day world," than a good stirring gallop across an open country; and, should it chance to be at the tail of a pack of foxhounds, why we think it not a whit the less inviting, and doubtless our horse would appreciate it far more fully. We really are