ing head—the "raw" but too plainly visible underneath the collar—the shrunken carcass, for which the shafts, narrow as they are, are yet "a world too wide." Watch him, as he mumbles the contents of his scanty nose-bag—positively he has hardly spirit enough left to swallow his miserable pittance!—there he stands, the very picture of patient, uncomplaining misery. And yet, most probably, before we are a hundred yards off, that wretched anatomy will be tearing through the town with an almost railroad velocity, and endangering the lives of a thousand harmless subjects of her most gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, at the corner of every thoroughfare in London. For the sake of your loving wife and affectionate family, venture not to cross his path! He is not the same horse that he was five minutes past;—a change has come over him,—a new spirit has possessed him. He seems to rush along the streets with a recklessness which nothing but the extreme of misery could inspire: there is despair in his face, graven as plainly as with an iron. Life has nothing worse in store for him, and the sooner he escapes from it the better! Alas! happy, even in his wretchedness, that he cannot look forward four or five days into the future, and behold that last, that crowning scene of equine misery, the yard of the knacker!
And now turn about, as you love a contrast, and look for a minute at that dray of Meux's as it comes thundering along over Claridge's Patent. Saw you ever such a Daniel Lambert of a horse as that fellow at the head of the team? He drags along that ponderous machine, laden as it is with "the good barley-wine which our forefathers did use to drink of," with as much ease as we would the toy-cart of our youngest born, who is but just out of his long-clothes. Do but listen to the sound of his hoof upon the pavement, and fancy for a moment, if your nerves will allow you, your worst corn awaiting its next descent! Proud is he, bad taste of his though it be, of his plaited main and tail;—(we would rather see them swing about, as Tommy Moore says of Norah's robe, "as nature pleases;")—proud is he of his brass-bedizened head-gear—proud of his size, his strength, and his occupation; nor altogether unconscious of the admiration he is exciting. His very shake of the head implies a scorn of the lanky, weedlike things that ever and anon flit by him, unworthy, in his opinion, of the name of horse;—the razor-faced, spare necked, delicate-legged, bang-tailed exquisites of the race; the paragons of Rotten Row and the Outer Circle—the cynosure of ladies' eyes—the admiration and envy of lawyers' clerks, linen drapers' apprentices, and Sunday swells of every possible species and description. See with what sublime complacency he regards that yelping cur that madly leapeth at his august nose, and trembleth not even to snap at his majestic heels! How would a less philosophical "tit" shy, and sidle, and prance, and toss his indignant head, and "yerk out his armed heel" against the audacious assailant;—but not so he—he, disdaining so inglorious a foe, looketh down with calm contempt upon the vain efforts of the scurvy tyke to arouse his wrath; and heareth with magnanimous pity the howl of the offender as he limps lamely away from the lash of the avenging drayman!
Whatever nonsense—we are going to fly off at a tangent—whatever nonsense Byron may have talked about the superfluous amount of knowledge respecting the old Greeks, he was himself any thing but a despiser of them. He inherited, to its fullest extent, their admiration of horses, or he could never have written Mazeppa.
Of that glorious poem, the horse, and not the man, is, to our thinking, the hero. The worthy Hetman is somewhat quaint and "rude in speech," and garnishes the story of his audacious amour with one or two pithy practical maxims, which go far to deaden the interest which we might otherwise feel for him, and his mistress, in a double sense. Of course we pity him, but still not with that pity which is "akin to love." But the horse! to him we can give ourselves up heart and soul—pity him as he struggles, "fiercely but in vain," to burst from the unwonted shackle—dash away with him—away! away! like lightning to the desert, which, though it be death to man, is to him life, and happiness, and home!—start with him at the groan wrung from his helpless burden by the extremity of
