No better horse was ever produced from that celebrated breed which Dionysius the Tyrant imported into Sicily from the Veneti. No better could have been found among all the progeny of the fifty thousand Mares belonging to the Great King, upon the Great Plain which the Greeks called Hippobotus because the Median herb which was the best pasture for horses abounded there. Whether the Nisæan horses which were used by kings, were brought from thence or from Armenia, antient Authors have not determined.
There was a tomb not far from the gates at Athens, ascending from the Piræus, on which a soldier was represented standing beside a Horse. All that was known of this monument in the age of Adrian was that it was the work of Praxiteles; the name of the person whose memory it was intended to preserve had perished. If Nobs and his Master had flourished at the same time with Praxiteles, that great sculptor would have thought himself worthily employed in preserving likenesses for posterity of the one and the other. He was worthy to have been modelled by Phidias or Lysippus. I will not wish that Chantrey had been what he now is, the greatest of living sculptors, fourscore years ago: but I may wish that Nobs and the Doctor had lived at the time when Chantrey could have made a bust of the one and a model of the other, or an equestrian statue to the joint honour of both.
Poppæa would have had such a horse shod with shoes of gold. Caligula would have made him Consul. William Rufus would have created him by a new and appropriate title Lord Horse of London Town.
When the French had a settlement in the Island of Madagascar, their Commander who took the title of Viceroy, assembled a force of 3000 natives against one of the most powerful native Chiefs, and sent with them 140 French under the Sieur de Chamargou. This Officer had just then imported from India the first horse which had ever been seen in Madagascar, and though oxmanship was practised by this people, as by some of the tribes on the adjacent coast of Africa, those oxriders were astonished at the horse; ils luy rendoient même des respects si profonds, que tous ceux qui envoyoient quelque deputation vers le General de cette armée, ne manquoient point de faire des presens et des complimens a Monsieur le Cheval. If Nobs had been that Horse, he would have deserved all the compliments that could have been paid him.
He would have deserved too, as far as Horse could have deserved, the more extraordinary honours which fell to the lot of a coal black steed, belonging to a kinsman of Cortes by name Palacios Rubios. In that expedition which Cortes made against his old friend and comrade Christoval de Olid, who in defiance of him had usurped a government for himself, the Spaniards after suffering such privations and hardships of every kind, as none but Spaniards could with the same patience have endured, came to some Indian settlements called the Mazotecas, being the name of a species of deer in the form of one of which the Demon whom the natives worshipped had once, they said, appeared to them, and enjoined them never to kill or molest in any way an animal of that kind. They had become so tame in consequence, that they manifested no fear at the appearance of the Spaniards, nor took flight till they were attacked. The day was exceedingly hot, and as the hungry hunters followed the chase with great ardour, Rubios's horse was overheated, and as the phrase was, melted his grease. Cortes therefore charged the Indians of the Province of Itza to take care of him while he proceeded on his way to the Coast of Honduras, saying that as soon as he fell in with the Spaniards of whom he was in quest, he would send for him; horses were of great value at that time, and this was a very good one. The Itzaex were equally in fear of Cortes and the Horse; they did not indeed suppose horse and rider to be one animal, but they believed both to be reasonable creatures, and concluded that what was acceptable to the one would be so to the other. So they offered him fowls to eat, presented nosegays to him of their most beautiful and fragrant flowers, and treated him as they would have treated a sick Chief, till to their utter dismay, he was starved to death. What was to be done when Cortes should send for him? The Cacique with the advice of his principal men gave orders that an Image of the Horse should be set up in the temple of his town, and that it should be worshipped there by the name of Tziminchac, as the God of Thunder and Lightning, which it seemed to them were used as weapons by the Spanish Horsemen. The honour thus paid to the Horse would they thought obtain credit for the account which they must give to the Spaniards, and prove that they had not wilfully caused his death.
The Itzaex however heard nothing of the Spaniards, nor the Spaniards of Rubios's black horse, till nearly an hundred years afterwards two Franciscans of the province of Yucatan, went as Missionaries among these Indians, being well versed in the Maya tongue, which is spoken in that country; their names were Bartolomé de Fuensalida and Juan de Orbita. The chief settlement was upon an Island in the Lake of Itza; there they landed, not with the good will either of the Cacique or the people, and entering the place of worship, upon one of their great Cus or Pyramids they beheld the Horse-Idol, which was then more venerated than all the other Deities. Indignant at the sight, Father Orbita took a great stone and broke to pieces the clay statue, in defiance of the cries and threats with which he was assailed. “Kill him who has killed our God,” they exclaimed; “kill him! kill him!” The Spaniards say the serene triumph and the unwonted beauty which beamed in Orbita's countenance at that moment, made it evident that he was acting under a divine impulse. His companion Fuensalida, acting in the same spirit, held up the Crucifix, and addressed so passionate and powerful an appeal to the Itzaex in their own language upon the folly and wickedness of their Idolatry and the benefits of the Gospel which he preached, that they listened to him with astonishment and admiration and awe, and followed the Friars respectfully from the place of worship, and allowed them to depart in safety.
These Franciscan Missionaries zealous and intrepid as they were, did but half their work. Many years afterwards when D. Martin de Ursua defeated the Itzaex in an action on the Lake, and took the Petén or Great Island, he found, in what appears to have been the same Adoratory, a decayed shin bone, suspended from the roof by three strings of different coloured cotton, a little bag beneath containing smaller pieces of bone in the same state of decay, under both there were three censers of the Indian fashion with storax and other perfumes burning, and a supply of storax near wrapt in dry leaves of maize, and over the larger bone an Indian coronet. These he was told upon enquiry, were the bones of the Horse which the Great Captain had committed to the care of their Cacique long ago.
If it had been the fate of Nobs thus to be idolified, and the Iztaex had been acquainted with his character, they would have compounded a name for him, not from Thunder and Lightning, but from all the good qualities which can exist in horse-nature, and for which words could be found in the Maya tongue.