The Sun.
London, England, 1867-03-22 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Handy Horse-Book. By a Cavalry Officer.
One Vol. Pp. 153. William Blackwood and

Sons.

Within the compass of a pocket volume, extend-
ing to no more than a hundred and fifty very
readable pages, " A Cavalry Officer" here gives
us the result of his own personal experiences
in regard to Driving, Riding, and the General
Care and Management of Horses, coupling
with the record of those same experiences
a variety of practical instructions not only in re-
gard to Riding and *riving, but in reference to all
the various departments of stable management—
Breeding, Selecting, Baying, Stabling, Grooming,
Haltering, Clothing, Feeding, Watering, Grazing,
Training, Harnessing, Shoeing, Drawing, Purging,
and Selling--to say nothing of Work, Vice, Pulse,
Diseases, and Operations. Nothing whatever that
Groom, Coachman, Huntsman, Veterinary Surgeon,
Stable-help, Farrier et hoc genus omne, could reason-
ably be expected to find notified in a popular
treatise of this character, has been anywhere over-
looked. Not that the book is intended so much for
the guidance of any one among these—being, rather
it should be said, designed as purely for the infor-
mation of masters, so as to put them better upon
their guard at every turn as to what should be done,
given, or avoided, under every rationally conceivable
circumstance of Stable Management. A single
instance, as to this, will be as good for us to ad-
duce as a dozen instances, as a score of them, or as
a hundred. Take in regard to this fact, therefore,
let us say at once, the one isolated section or divi-
sion of the work, under the head " Grooming." Four
cardinal rules are there laid down at starting.
First, one to the effect that the groom must never
be allowed to doctor the horse himself, that is on
his own unaided or unguided responsibility. In-
stead of which he is to be required invariably to
apprise his master of whatever may have hap-
pened whether, for example, it be accident,
wound, or symptom of indisposition ; receiving
thereupon his master's instructions as to what is
to be done, or as to whom he may call in.
Secondly, that he is never to exercise a horse
anywhere but where his master has appointed,
and never to indulge in either cantering or
galloping. Thirdly, that he is always to stand
by, carefully observant, while the shoes of
the animal are being changed or removed, so
that he may see himself that whatever instruc-
tions he has had in regard to the shoeing are
strictly attended to by the farrier. Fourth, that
he is never to be allowed, at his own option, to
clean his horse out of doors. All these rules
Magenta—the Sobriquet by which the Cavalry
Officer who writes the book is known (as he him-
self tell us in a foot-note to his Preface) in his own
Regiment—recounts or lays down as so many Laws
of the Medes and Persians—doing so, as he adds,
upon the good old principle of Prevention being
better than Cure. So scrupulously exact is he in
his instructions upon this branch or upon that
branch of his subject, that if he undertakes to
enumerate (as he does at page 15) ,the various
requisites or appliances of a groom, he does
so with an eye to the utmost minutia for-
getting nothing, but setting them all down,
one after another, item by item—body-brush,
water-brush, dander-brush, picker, scraper, mane-
comb, curry-comb, pitchfork, shovel-and-broom,
manure-basket, chamois-leather, bucket, sponges,
dusters, corn-seive, measures, leather boot for
poultices, clyster-syringe, drenching-horn, linen-
bandages, woollen-bandages, stopping-box, tow-and-
tar, chalk and rock-salt. He has capital advice to
give, too, in the matter of clipping and singeing, of
cleaning and of bandaging. Hunt where we will for
an oversight, we can nowhere discover any. Com-
prehensive and minutely-detailed though the book
is, it is so scrupulously exact in treating of every-
thing that could possibly be touched upon in rela-
tion to the Care and Management of Horses, that
one might almost be disposed to regard the little
Handy Book before us as one that had passed
through an immense number of editions, having at
every reprint or reissue been subjected to the
most searching revision and correction. Treat-
ing of the colour of horses, we find the " Cavalry
Officer's" opinion sound enough according
to our own experience his preference being
given to bay, brown, black, grey, or dark
chestnut, as compared with pie-balls, skew-
balls, cream-coloured, roan, white, or mouse-
coloured. Admirably exact, again, is Magenta's
key to the judging of age by the teeth, that is by
the permanent nippers or front teeth in the lower
jaw--those said front teeth or nippers being six
in number. At from Two to Three the two
front teeth are cut and placed. At from Three-
and-a-Half to Four—the next pair of nippers.
While, between Four-and-a-Half and Five the
corner pair not only appear, but the tusks in the
male are produced. Again, as the Cavalry Officer
intimates—At Six years old the marks or cavities
in these nippers are worn off or effaced in the two
centre teeth. At Seven, in the next pair, and at
Eight in the corner pair, the animal being then
pronounced aged. Gradually after that, as time
runs on, the horse growing older year after year,
the oval form of the nippers changes until at last,
when the animal is about Twenty years of
age, it is not oval in any way, but completely and
distinctly triangular. Another indication of age in
the growth of the horse is this—that after Six the
tusks every successive year get blunter, the grooves,
very visible at that age inside them, becoming at
length smoothed away altogether. Enough has
already been here remarked, however, to indicate the
popular and practical character of a work that will
be found to be a perfect treasury of information to any
owner of a horse in the three kingdoms, as beyond
any doubt of it, the handiest among all the Handy
Horse books that have ever yet been published
within our own knowledge.

Pope's Poetical Works. One Vol. Pp. 526.
William Tegg.
A charming little bijou edition of our Eng-
lish Horace is here provided for the corner of
the pocket or of the knapsack, of the valise or of
the portmanteau of all travelling Britons who love
to carry about with them what we remember once to
have heard Leigh Hunt call " a bit of home," mean-
ing ono or two of the choicest of, one's favourite books
more particularly when they happen to be portions
of our poetical literature. Pope as a poet, too, is
almost a literature in himself. In order to regard
him at his highest and best—as a moralist and as a
philosopher—we have but to turn to his noblest work
of all, one of the noblest poems in the lan-
guage, his " Essay on Man." To view him as
a satirist we have but to turn the leaves
of the " Dunciad," the dazzling wit, the
poignant and incisive irony, the side-shaking
humour, of which, are all ennobled and perfected,
so to speak, by the affecting and sublime moral in-
culcated in the closing passage of that most remark-
able work—a passage in reading which aloud,
years after its composition, the voice of Pope him-
self is said to have broken in tears—and in alluding
to which incident Dr. Johnson exclaimed, to the
person with whom he was talking about it, •‘ And
no wonder, Sir, for it is divine." As an observer,
again, of the artificial society in which he himself
moved in those—" teacup times of hoop and hood"
—the days of Anne, what a char Laing memorial of
his style and taste, of the vivacity and espiglerie of
his intellect, has he not left us in his dainty, ima-
ginative phantasy, entitled " The Rape of the
Lock." Then, as a lover of nature, observe him, as
he reveals himself to our view, as in his Pastorals.
As an appreciator of the classics—behold him iu his
transcripts from Horace. Then, too, The Messiah
—The Temple of Fame—Vertumnus and Pomona
—Eloise and Abelard—Windsor Forest—The Wife
of Bath--The Universal Prayer—The Dying Chris-
tian to his Soul—January and May—the Essay on
Criticism. Remembering all which, as well as all the
rest of his various poems, needless here in any way to
be enumerated, are we not in a manner justified in
speaking of him as in himself a literature? And
Pope in his entirety thus as a Poet is here in this
new and beautiful little edition, placed within reach
of us all as a companion volume that it is a po4itive