Wine the Doctor did not find it necessary to give him, even in his old age; although he was aware of the benefit which the horse of Messire Philippe De Comines derived from it after the battle of Montl'hery: “J'avoye,” says that sagacious soldier, “un cheval extremement las et vieil; Il beut un seau plein de vin; par aucun cas d'aventure il y mit le museau; Je le laissay achever; Jamais ne l'avoye trouvé si bon ne si frais.”
He was not such a horse as that famous one of Julius Cæsar's, which had feet almost like human feet, the hoofs being cleft after the manner of toes. Leo X. had one which in like manner had what Sir Charles Bell calls digital extremities; and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, he tells us, had seen one with three toes on the fore-foot and four on the hind-foot; and such a horse was not long since exhibited in London and at Newmarket.—No! Nobs was not such a horse as this;—if he had been so mis-shapen he would have been a monster. The mare which the Tetrarch of Numidia sent to Grandgousier and upon which Gargantua rode to Paris, had feet of this description; but that mare was la plus enorme et la plus grande que fut oncques veüe, et la plus monstreuse.
He was a perfect horse;—worthy to belong to the perfect Doctor,—worthy of being immortalized in this perfect history. And it is not possible to praise him too much,
οὓνεκ᾽ ἀριστος
Ἳππῶν, ὅσσοι ἔασιν ὑπ᾽ ἠώ τ᾽ ἡέλιον τε:9
not possible I repeat, porque, as D. Juan Perez de Montalvan says, parece que la naturaleza le avia hecho, no con la prisa que suele, sino con tanto espacio y perfection, que, como quando un pintor acaba con felicidad un lienzo, suele poner a su lado su nombre, assi pudo la Naturaleza escrivir el suyo, como por termino de su ciencia: which is, being translated, “Nature seemed to have made him, not with her wonted haste, but with such deliberation and perfection, that as a painter when he finishes a picture successfully, uses to mark it with his name, so might Nature upon this work have written hers, as being the utmost of her skill!” As Shakespeare would have expressed it—
Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, this was a Horse.
9 HOMER.
In the words of an old romance, to describe him ainsi qu'il apartient seroit difficile jusques à l'impossibilité, beyond which no difficulty can go.
He was as excellent a horse, the Doctor used to say, as that which was first chosen to be backed by Cain, and which the divine Du Bartas, as rendered by the not less divine Sylvester, thus describes,
With round, high, hollow, smooth, brown, jetty hoof;
With pasterns short, upright, but yet in mean;
Dry sinewy shanks; strong fleshless knees and lean;
With hart-like legs; broad breast, and large behind,
With body large, smooth flanks, and double chined;
A crested neck, bowed like a half bent bow,
Whereon a long, thin, curled mane doth flow;
A firm full tail, touching the lowly ground,
With dock between two fair fat buttocks drown'd;
A pricked ear, that rests as little space
As his light foot; a lean, bare, bony face,
Thin joule, and head but of a middle size;
Full, lively-flaming, quickly-rolling eyes;
Great foaming mouth, hot fuming nostril wide;
Of chesnut hair, his forehead starrified;
Three milky feet, a feather in his breast,
Whom seven-years-old at the next grass he guest.