man mounts, that, on his taking his seat as above, the girth will be drawn forcibly upwards; a proof that the saddle must have relinquished in a corresponding degree its previous 'gripe' of the horse's back, or rather shoulder. Now let your man dismount, loosen the girths a little, and put a surcingle right over the middle of the saddle; draw this equally tight as the girth had been previously, and put your rider once more into the saddle, making him, however, sit exactly in the middle over the surcingle: your finger, if placed as before, will now tell you, if it should not be apparent to the eye, that the surcingle has become looser, the saddle has assumed a more intimate contact with the horse's back throughout, and is sure not to slip or wound.'

Scarcely second to this in importance is the position of the stirrup, which in nearly all English saddles is too far forward.

"The point from which the stirrup is suspended has nearly an equal influence on the stability of the saddle, and a much greater one on the form of the seat than the position of the girths. If the stirrups be wrong, all the rest being right will be of little avail. What is the legitimate use of the stirrups besides enabling us to mount our horses? The first and most obvious one is to give the rider lateral support, to prevent his slip ping off to the right or left by his seat revolving round the horse's body as a wheel does round an axle. In riding bare-backed, or on a saddle without stirrups, if the rider falls it is most generally to one side, and not directly

per

forwards or backwards; and it is very evident that the more directly under the rider's seat the stirrups be suspended, the more efficiently will they perform this duty, the resistance offered by them being perpendicularly upwards, or precisely in the opposite direction to that in which the weight falls, which is pendicularly downwards; whereas, if the stirrups be suspended at a distance from the rider's seat, they act at an angle to the line of fall: they may, and always do, in such a position change the direction of the fall, but they cannot meet and prevent it so efficiently as when placed under the seat. The second use

of these contrivances is to enable the rider, for various purposes, to rise in his saddle by standing in the stirrups. And here a distinction must be drawn as to whether it is the rider's object to transmit his own weight indirectly through the stirrups to the saddle at the same point at which he previously applied it directly with his seat, or at some other point. In the first case it is very obvious that the stirrups are best placed exactly under the rider's seat; for, putting aside any changes of the position of his own body from the hips upwards he may please to make, everything remains as before, and the equilibrium of the horse is not disturbed. In the second case, on the contrary, supposing the stirrups to be placed far forwards, and the rider far back in the saddle, standing in the stirrups will at once throw the weight from one end of the saddle to the other; make this press partially on the horse's back instead of equably, as in the first case, which seesawing must tend to make the saddle shift, and must also alter the equilibrium of the horse, throwing its weight more forward, consequently rendering the animal incapable of turning sharply and handily, and, if done suddenly, frequently even bringing it to a dead halt. In hunting, sharp turns are seldom required, whilst speed is; and therefore there is a justification for throwing the in jumping; but even this has certain weight forwards or backwards, especially

limits, of which more hereafter. Again, in road-riding, the English fashion of trotting requires a man to rise in his stirrups; but there is really no reason why he should therefore sacrifice the lateral support spoken of above to the extent one often sees, or throw such a surplusage of weight on his horse's fore

hand. There can be no doubt that he rides less safely by so doing, for a sharp wheel-round of a shying horse is more likely to bring him down; but this question of trotting must be also reserved for a future chapter."

Nothing can be better than the whether in teaching it would be author's judgment on the question, better to discard the use of the bridle or the stirrup? We go with him completely in opinion that

"rein-riding," or holding on by the bridle, is the greatest of all faults in horsemanship. It would be far better to dispense with the bridle in early school practice than with the stirrups. That lightness of hand can only be the gift of those whose seat on horseback is not at all dependent on the bridle, is reason enough for securing the seat before attending to the bridle-hand. If the fault of rein-riding could be limited to the discomfort or insecurity of the individual who practised it if the luckless offender could be made to pay the whole penalty himself—we should not, perhaps, stigmatise it with such severity; but unhappily this is not the case, for the demoralisation extends to the miserable animal he bestrides; and the horse whose "mouth" had possibly been made perfection by care and skill, will, in one day of such ignorant horsemanship, be so vitiated, so untuned," as to render the animal irritable in temper and uncertain in action, and, with a continuance of the practice, a "regular brute." We speak with some painful recollections in this matter. Among others we recall having lent a cob, trained to a degree of perfection that a touch of the finger would have sufficed to intimate to him the rider's wish, to a certain sailor friend who assured us he could ride. We knew him to be a clever fellow in his own career-a gunnery-lieutenant, with heaven knows what number of "good" marks for the "Excellent," and what is called a most promising young officer; but he brought us back our beast smashed on both knees, and with a bleeding mouth, in less than a quarter of an hour after he mounted him, though we had not believed, till the dis

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aster occurred, that there was a man in her Majesty's service could have thrown the animal down without the aid of a lasso.

The resources of a bad rider are, however, like the x of algebra, an unknown quantity, and the mischief of one single day's ineptness can only be compared to the damage that would be done to a pianoforte in perfect tune by a coarse fellow hammering over the notes with a cleaver till he smashed the strings and split the soundboard.

When one bethinks him of all the nice treatment and delicate handling it has taken to make the mouth of a pleasant horse, to have got his neck arched to its due degree, and to have placed him in that position of perfect balance in which to mount him is a positive luxury, the mere thought of submitting him to an ignorant or a careless hand, is something little short of a profanation; and yet this is a species of courtesy to which we are daily driven-the individual profiting by which not having the very faintest conception of the sacrifice to which our politeness has led us.

Be it a maxim, therefore: Seldom lend your horse to a sailor, never to a Frenchman, and as little as you can to any one at all.

We commend the chapter on Bits and Bitting especially to the reader's attention. It is written with thorough knowledge of the subject, and combines everything that experience guided by admirable good sense and good temper can write, to make it a text-book for the rider.

There are few men who are interested about horses who will not appreciate the value of this book; there is no man who keeps a horse that should not read it.

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THE 'Times' jubilantly informed the world the other day, that during one of Mr Gladstone's election tours in Lancashire 50,000 of his words had been telegraphed to their office. The immortal gods are naturally reticent, and we have not heard that they shared the elation of the metropolitan Jove. There is an observation made by Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, in one of his philosophical writings, which Professor Wilson used to repeat: "Words are wise men's counters- they do but reckon with them; but they are the money of fools;" and it is not difficult to imagine the sort of reception which Mr Thomas Carlyle, at least, must have given to the above piece of news, if it got all the way to Chelsea: Idle words could once escape unrecorded-dispersed in empty air by the merciful gods. But now, alas! they are not carried away innocently on the breeze; they are captured by shorthand writers, transmitted by electricity, stereotyped by the devil and his angels. A triumph of mechanical contrivance, unquestionably; but, to put it to no worthier purpose than the preservation of voluminous electioneering palaver, far better forgotten is it not lamentable? The foresaid number of words is equal, or thereby, we may assume, to the whole literature of antiquity! This vain expenditure of human labour, this waste of human ingenuity, is surely one of the most astounding and portentous features of the mellifluous age, the golden Gladstonian era, on which we enter."

Among these 50,000 words, however, were one half-dozen which deserve to be remembered. Passionately appealing to the men of Lancashire not to dismiss him from their service, and replying to the argument that he had secured

The

a seat elsewhere, the orator said in effect, "Greenwich is a very different constituency from Lancashire. It does not carry the same authority with the empire. Its vote, indeed, tells quite as effectively in a party division; but the moral difference is immense. For when we ask the national verdict on an imperial issue, votes must be weighed as well as counted." We propose to inquire (following out Mr Gladstone's suggestion) on which side the weight of the vote recorded in England during last November was given. It is at the present moment a most important inquiry. numerical majority of votes in the House of Commons may determine the fate of a Ministry; the fate of a national institution must depend upon their weight. It is, moreover, from a party point of view, both prospectively and retrospectively, a very interesting inquiry. The Constitution, since the House of Commons was dissolved, has undergone an organic change. The franchise has been extended. Household suffrage has become law. Less than two years ago Mr Lowe described in graphic language the Iliad of woes through which we were about to pass. A republic, with or without Mr Bright as President, was visible in the not distant future: meanwhile the Tories had cut their own throats. Before the elections of 1868 were concluded, they would, as a political party, be extinct as the dodo. Well, the elections are over, and even the most timid of us, after our dive into the deep sea, are shaking our wings again, and feeling that the experiment is really much pleasanter than we had ventured to expect. There can be no doubt that the extension of the franchise has invigorated Conservatism. The Tory party has voluntarily widened its borders, and the experience of the elections

demonstrates, as its leaders had believed, that it flourishes most vigorously when "broad-based upon the people's will." Even the Cassandra of Calne (now of the Exchequer), if not discomfited, is silent, the vaticinations of calamity and disaster somehow won't come true, and the prophet's business is gone. Two hundred and seventysix Tory gentlemen have been returned to Parliament by the English democracy, and Mr Bright is not President of the Republic, but President of the Board of Trade. All men can see that the Tory party is still intact; but we are convinced that an examination of the electoral returns will show that it is at the present moment substantially more powerful than it has been at any time since 1846, and specially that upon the question of the day the opinion of the people of England has been elicited with remarkable distinctness.

The opinion of the people of England, we say advisedly; for it is clear to every statesman that, except with the deliberate consent of the English people, the English Church must not and cannot be dismembered. The issue is one on which, from the nature of the case, the constituencies of the outlying portions of the kingdom - the Roman Catholics of Connaught, the Voluntaries of Scotland, the Welsh Dissenters-cannot be permitted to overrule the judgment of the empire. There are, moreover, special reasons why the opinions of the majority of the elective bodies in Scotland and Ireland should on this occasion be narrowly and jealously scrutinised.

As regards the southern districts of Ireland, more or less tainted with disloyalty, the proposition cannot well be controverted. When a Conservative candidate cannot appear on the hustings without getting his head broken, when a Conservative voter cannot go to the poll without the risk of being shot down in the street, we

VOL. CV.-NO. DCXXXIX.

need not wonder that in such districts the Constitution-the Representation of the People Act as well as the Habeas Corpus Act-should be virtually suspended. Anything like a contest in the south of Ireland was sure to produce a serious breach of the peace; and we are not surprised, therefore, that the Conservative party should have declined to embarrass those who are responsible for the public safety. In certain circumstances they would not have been entitled to have shrunk from the performance of their Constitutional functions. Under certain conditions it would have become their imperative duty to exercise the franchise at any risk. But these conditions do not exist in the disaffected districts of Ireland; for the verdict of the Catholic priesthood, and of the flocks they drive to the polling-booths, cannot be permitted to alter or qualify the conclusion at which the British Parliament may ultimately arrive. It was quite clear, indeed, that the Irish Romanists would vote in a body for the destruction of the rival episcopate-a fact which should be seriously weighed by those who support Mr Gladstone's policy on the plea that it will promote the interests of religious liberty. It may hereafter appear that the free Protestant intelligence of the empire is in favour of devoting to Irish secular uses the revenues of the Irish branch of the Church of England; but the gift must be a free and voluntary dedication: England will never permit it to be extorted by the clamour of a disaffected populace and a fanatical priesthood. The Irish Church may be doomed; but we venture to believe that it will survive until the majority in favour of disestablishment is not mainly composed of the nominees of an Ultramontane hierarchy. On the other hand, the elections have shown that the northern and eastern provinces, the metropolis and the university, are still sound and

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loyal. The counties of Dublin and Monaghan have been won by great majorities; and the Constitutional losses in Belfast and one or two of the Ulster boroughs are not permanent gains to Mr Gladstone. The dissensions among the Conservatives in that quarter-mainly due, indeed, to the strength and intensity of the Orange and antiCatholic sentiment - are to be deplored; but we believe that, before another election takes place, their divisions will be healed; that wise and conciliatory counsels will prevail; and that these famous steadfast Protestant communities will again, as of old, present an unbroken front to the enemy.

We do not look at the issue of the Scotch elections simply from a party point of view when we say that we regard it with deep regret. The intellectual Liberal cannot witness this unprecedented agreement of opinion throughout a whole province without a feeling of discomfort and apprehension. Party government, of course, becomes impossible when there are no parties, or (which comes practically to the same thing) when there is one only. We may call each other as ugly names as we can invent; but both Whig and Tory are aware that the vigour of our public life depends mainly upon the keenness of our political antagonism. When a whole people march like a regiment and vote like a machine, when a military monotony of sentiment takes possession of them, and whatever is eccentric or original or independent in religious or political life is coarsely and stupidly repressed, one is tempted to inquire how far the influences which have produced these results are truly Liberal, and how far the culture to which they are due can be regarded as catholic. A vulgar and illiterate form of dissent has gradually been gaining ascendancy throughout Scotland. It is narrow in sympathy, ungenerous in temper, fanatical in belief, tyrannical in practice. Its ministers, Puritanic

in demeanour, ascetic in profession, do not hesitate, nevertheless, to take an active part in secular politics, and in the intrigues of the world. The sect is all-powerful in the metropolis (where it plays such pranks before high heaven as make not the angels only, but even Whig lawyers and Whig journals weep), and there are few provincial burghs where it has not enlisted a majority of the electors. The most Radical elector in the most Radical constituency is sure to belong to the United Presbyterian Church; and the consequence is, that in Scotland political Radicalism and ecclesiastical intemperance have become convertible terms. The régime which it desires to inaugurate is one of mean monotony and abject intellectual bondage, a social state, in certain aspects, not unlike that described in the passage from the 'Leviathan' which Mr Henry Taylor has prefixed to 'Philip Van Arteveldte': "No arts, no letters, no society,— and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violence, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish." It is this faction which, as Parliamentary electors, have made the reputable citizens of Edinburgh ashamed of their renowned and lettered city. It is this faction which, as patrons of the University, have placed an obscure Doctor of a Voluntary Church in the chair of Dugald Stewart and John Wilson.

It is this faction which, as patrons of the Church, manifested a yet graver disregard of the restraints and decencies and obligations of public life, when they appointed a successor to the late Dr Lee simply upon the ground that the appointment would prove obnoxious to the congregation over which he was placed. These are the men to whom, in their own estimation, the direction of modern "progress" has been intrusted. To these narrow and malignant bigots (bigots out of whom all the heroic fire of the old Covenant has died), the merciless ex