When the North shall launch its avalanche on her works of art and science?
Hath she not wept her cities swept by our herds of swarming stallions,
And tower and arch crushed in the march of our barbarous battalions?
Can we not wield our fathers’ shield, the same war-hatchet handle?
Do our blades want length, or the reapers strength, for the harvest of the Vandal?
Then fiercely neigh, my charger grey! Oh! thy chest is broad and ample,
And thy hoofs shall prance o’er the fields of France, and the pride of her heroes trample.
The horses of the Cossacks, bred on the Steppes, though far inferior to those of the Circassians, are, nevertheless, a serviceable race, strong-boned, well-limbed, and with a good proportion of blood; though their forms are angular and inelegant, and their necks ewed, they are fast and hardy. The Cossacks, like all equestrian nations, ride with very short stirrups, and they use only the snaffle bridle.
Why is it that all the regular armies of Europe, including that of England, have adopted a style of riding which has no one advantage except that of pleasing the eye, and, in reality, only the eye of those unacquainted with the true principles of equitation? A rider sitting bolt upright, with his legs at full stretch, is in the worst possible position for grasping the animal’s body by the pressure of his thighs, knees, and calves, for exercising an easy control over the mouth, and favouring the efforts of the horse by the motions of the rider’s body. According to all the varieties of the long or military system of riding, the horse requires as much teaching as the rider; and nearly every horse, of a vigorous and spirited breed, is ruined by this course of teaching. “All equestrian nations ride with the bended leg, or as it is commonly termed, short, simply because experience has taught them its advantages. The English jockies, fox-hunters, and steeple-chasers, who get the utmost speed out of their horse, who teach him to traverse, and assist him over the most tremendous leaps, all ride short. The South American Indians—men who live and die, as it were, on the backs of their horses—the Moors of the coast of Barbary—and the Bedouin Arabs of the Desert, all ride short. The extinct body of Mamelukes, who were Circassians, and the tribes of Circassians now inhabiting the Caucasus—the most dextrous men in the universe, in the use of their arms, and the management of their horses, for all the purposes of combat; who stop them in their wildest gallop, who wheel them round a hat, and who, not riding more than an average of eleven stone, can lift from the saddle the most brawny and burly riding-master as if he were a child—these men not only use nothing but a snaffle, but actually double up the leg and thigh almost in the following manner: 〉. One moment’s examination of the limb in this position, will, by showing the muscles, both of the calf and inner thigh, brought to their utmost prominence, at once explain how singularly the powers of adhesion must be increased by it.
“The seat of a Cossack, who is accustomed to back a horse from his earliest childhood, is about as short as that of the English fox-hunter. It is amusing, in the sham fights of Krasnoe Zelo, to see the contemptuous ease with which a single Cossack forager, will disengage himself from a dozen or two of cuirassiers of the guard, raining the blows of his lance-shaft about their helms and shoulders, loosening in their saddles those who attempt to stop him, and then getting away from them like a bird, with a laugh of derision in answer to the curses they mutter after him.”—Revelations of Russia.