entreat it earnestly, the spirit of the time that
is yet to come. Let us look to the present of
England and France.

ln what country of Europe does the
thorough-bred horse still enact the most
brilliant part? It is in England, undoubtedly,
that he takes the lead. If we were not
previously aware that an inordinate love of the
perpendicular, and a horror of the ellipse,
were the most striking traits of the English
character, the treatment which the Arabian
horse has experienced would be quite
sufficient to demonstrate that truth. The Arab
horse, as he came from the hands of his
Creator, was an admirable animal; a harmonious
compound of suppleness, vigour, and
lightness; taking rank, in the list of creatures
that are eminently graceful, immediately after
woman and the cat. The contour of his chest
and croup respectively rival, in their delicacy
and purity, the sweetest outlines of the
feminine form. The system of elastic curves,
which succeed and correspond to each other
over the whole extent of the creature's body,
from the crown of his head to the extremity
of his limbs, had been contrived for no other
purpose than to save the rider from all
possibility of shock, and to convert the movement
of the gallop into a gentle oscillation.  Hence,
also, the secret of the infinite smoothness of
the paces of the Arab horse, the grace of his
gait, and the sureness of his foot.

M. Toussenel writes of English horses
with a very hard pen. He declares
his British admirer thought fit to improve
these points, and to model them after his
ideal type of beauty—the right angle—which
his imagination delights to revel in. England
has spent thousands upon thousands of pounds,
and two whole centuries of pains-taking, to
obtain the marvellous result called the race-horse,
which recalls, to all those who have
yawned over their geometry, certain charming
details of the square of the hypothenuse. It
has atrocious action, a hard mouth, and a
perfidious foot. For this last reason it is never
suffered to run except on perfectly level
ground, which must not be in the least slippery,
but entirely free from stones, and
pebbles. It has to work three or four times
a year, for three or four minutes each time,
and is in other respects completely useless,
either for war, sport, or for taking an airing.
Such preposterous steeds require a special
race of riders. By means of elaborate chemical
processes, England has succeeded in creating
the genus "jockey "—an intermediate race
between the Laplander and the jockoo monkey,
deriving its name from the latter quadruman.
The race-horse, in fact, is not a horse; it
is a pure piece of abstract speculation—a
betting machine—and nothing more.

France, with her hundred million acres,
cannot produce a sufficiency of chargers, even
to supply the miserable demands of her
cavalry. That fact alone is enough to indicate
that the French nobility have passed away,
and have undergone the great change from
life to death. Privileges, parchments, rights
of lordship, and other tinsel trappings of
human vanity, were all burnt together, in
one night, sixty years ago; and the castles
of the last descendants of crusaders have been
sold by auction, to become the property of
the heroes of the treacle-tub and the spirit-cask.
The yoke of barbarous conquest is
broken; but France is none the freer for
that. For, if the territory of France no longer
produces the war-horse, the emblem of feudal
nobility, it makes up for the deficiency by
abundantly producing the diligence horse,
the emblem of mercantile feudality, France
is (or rather, was) in the hands of
stock-jobbers, bankers, and monopolists of the
public ways. The only horse, therefore,
which is heartily cherished, is the transport
horse, the beast of draught and burthen.
The other was the handsomest, but his loss
need not be regretted.

Paris is the mirror and the focus of France.
The capital gives its tone to the provinces.
The horse which plays first-fiddle at Paris
and throughout the rest of the Empire; the
horse which is the most frequently talked
about, is the stagecoach-post-diligence-and-
omnibus horse. The statistics of the
administration prove that this burdensome
quadruped lames, in Paris alone, two persons
and a fraction per day; and that it costs the
Parisian population the life of exactly two
victims monthly. But it is not entirely the
fault of the animal. In the metropolis of
France, the abode of opulence and happiness,
there exist a number of individuals who have
no other means of livelihood than to cast
themselves under the wheels of a carriage,
to get a limb or two broken, in order to
receive a compensation from the owner which
shall find them in bread for the rest of their
days. Some are successful; others fail;
whilst others, again, are cut in two—they
don't mind it: it is all in the way of the
profession they have voluntarily adopted.

The most inoffensive of all horses, but not the
least estimable, is the fiacre or hackney coach
horse, a modest race of Breton or Ardennaise
extraction, and which does not pant for war,
with flaming nostrils. It is the emblem of the
humble workman, who is incessantly goaded
by the spur of want, and who is obliged to
rest wherever he happens to find himself,
without any friendly shelter to protect him
from the rigour of the seasons; whilst his
unhappy head, weighed down with fatigue,
sorrowfully droops towards the ground. The
brutal driver, who scourges him, scarcely
gives him time to stop and eat, But, alas,
the driver himself is tortured by the lash of
a master more barbarous and pitiless still—
competition, the fury of civilisation. The
cabriolet horse, and the coucou horse, speak
eloquently of the diverse phases, the
unexpected falls, and the eclipsed splendours of
equine existence.