Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide.”
It would take long, also it is unnecessary, to describe at length all the horses of which Shakespeare speaks in his plays. According to a recent writer, Oliver's steed, Ferrant d'Espagne, or “Spanish traveller,” has been “bastardised.” What the writer means is, I think, that the horse has been introduced into works of fiction without acknowledgment.
Such certainly is the case, and so greatly has the animal been distorted in some instances that only with difficulty is it recognisable.
In Shakespeare's time—that is to say during the latter half of the sixteenth and in the beginning of the seventeenth centuries—the barbary horse clearly was highly esteemed, for it is referred to frequently in books and memoirs which bear upon that period.
Shakespeare speaks several times of roan horses too, as for instance in I Henry IV., where we come upon the sentence, “Give the roan horse a drench.” To bay horses he makes allusion in King Lear, in Timon, and elsewhere, and in Timon he refers also to a team of white horses. These bare allusions make dry reading, but they are instructive and of interest in connection with the story of the part the horse played in British history.
More especially is this so when we again bear in mind what has already been stated at length in the introductory note to this book, and that is the enormous extent to which automobilism has increased in this country, and for that matter the world over, since the introduction of the petrol motor, which makes it obvious that the horse's reign must be fast drawing to a close.
That we have, as a nation, already to a great extent lost much of the interest we took only a few years ago in horses, and in all that appertains to them, is, I think, beyond dispute. The number of men who keep what must be termed “pleasure” horses decreases year by year, almost month by month, and indeed it would be possible to name at off-hand between fifty and sixty well-known men and women fond of sport who, within the last six months or so, have sold their carriages and all their harness horses, and whose stables now contain only hunters, while in other cases even the hunters have been got rid of in order to make way for automobiles.
And yet, bemoan the change though we may, the gradual transition is not uninteresting to study. History in the past has for centuries been both directly and indirectly affected by the horses and horsemanship of the various races the world over. History in the future is going to be similarly affected by motor power applied in a variety of ways.
And yet, who knows? Perhaps even half-a-century hence, when the horse will to all intents be extinct in England, save where he is kept for racing and in some instances for hunting purposes, interest may still be taken in Shakespeare's plays and therefore in the stories of such whimsical characters as the self-satisfied, conceited and generally grotesque Sir Andrew Aguecheek and his celebrated grey steed, Capilet, that we find portrayed so admirably in Twelfth Night; in Lord Lafeu of All's Well that Ends Well and his curious bay horse, Curtal, a name that means literally “the cropped one”; and in Cut, the carrier's horse of King Henry IV.,—to name but a few of Shakespeare's creations that surely must live on for ever.