is, strictly, impossible. It is possible to state a great many
facts about its manners and morals; to quote its figures of
mortality, its vital statistics. We can recount what it ate, what
it wore, what it read, how it treated its women and children
and animals. . . . But its life-quality eludes us, save as it comes
to us like a flavour, a perfume, a clamour of voices, from a
heath, a kitchen door, a busy street, in an unapprebended
moment of revelation, while we look at some memorial in
print or paint or stucco-pasted brick. Look at a picture of a
racehorse by Seymour or Stubbs or Morland. Look at Stubbs'
famous portrait of the Prince's carriage-horses and equestrian
servants. For this was the age of the horse, par excellence; 'the
noblest friend of man', richly caparisoned, docked of tail, with
burnished coat in fine condition by reason of a diet far more
nourishing than that of millions of two-legged beasts of burden.
Everyone who went anywhere at speed went on, or behind a
horse. Twenty-five thousand rural blacksmiths waited on this
equine aristocracy in shoes alone. Considerably more waited
upon its feeding and watering, its housing and its health and
its daily exercise.

There, in the middle of the Regency scene, stands Vandyke, or
Atlas, or Careless, his barrel like a gutted herring, his tiny pointed

The Prince of Wales' carriage-horses

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