From Newcastle’s book on horsemanship
“If you can’t gain your point one way, you must have recourse to another. You would make your horse advance, and he to defend himself against you runs back; at that instant pull him back with all your strength, and if to oppose you he advances, immediately force him briskly forwards. If you would turn to the right, and he endeavours to turn to the left, pull him round to the left as suddenly as possible: if you would turn him to the left, and he insists on the right, turn him as smartly to the right as you are able.... If he would rise,” probably the author means rear, “make him rise two or three times.” A very, very dangerous piece of advice! “In a word, follow his inclinations in everything, and change as often as he. When he perceives there can be no opposition, but that you always will the same thing as he, he will be amazed, he will breathe short, snuff up his nose, and won’t know what to do next.”
In these days, we are apt to consider good hands and the skilful use of the bridle of the utmost possible importance in horsemanship. Newcastle was of a different opinion.
“The bridle,” he says,[156] “I confess, is of some use, tho’ but little; art avails much more, as all your excellent riders well know; for I have managed a horse with a halter only, and he went as well as with the bridle.... I have also managed an English one with a scarf, and made him curvet and vault very justly.”
[156] P. 27.
Yet he tells us, later, that, in addition to his favourite curb, with a high port and rings on it, and appallingly long cheeks to the bit—a bridle about which the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have something to say, were it used in these days—he liked to have a caveson on his horse’s nose, with the reins fastened to the pommel of his saddle. By the way, in an illustration, the saddle which he says cannot possibly be improved upon, looks more like an elephant’s howdah than the saddle of a horse.
Here is some queer anatomy with some still queerer inference from it.
The horse’s[157] “fore-legs are made like those of a man, having his knee bending forward; and his hind-legs like a man’s arm, having the sinews of his ham bending backwards, which is diametrically opposite to the former. If the hind-legs of a horse bent in the same manner as those before, he would walk upright like a man; but his hind-legs bending contrary, they resemble the arm of a man, and his fore-legs bend as ours, which makes him go upon all four; and there is no other reason for beasts going upon all four, with their bellies to the ground.”
[157] P. 63.