Philip Astley was the best breaker and trainer of horses then living. He bought his horses in Smithfield, seldom giving more than five pounds for one, and selecting them for their docility, without regard to symmetry or colour. He seems to have been the first equestrian who taught horses to dance, the animals going through the figure, and stepping in time to the music. One of his horses, called Billy, would lift a kettle off a fire, and arrange the tea equipage for company, in a manner which elicited rounds of applause. He was a very playful animal, and would play with Astley and the grooms like a kitten. His owner was once induced to lend him for a week or two to Abraham Saunders, who had been brought up by Astley, and was at that time, as well as at many other times, involved in pecuniary difficulties. While Billy was in the possession of Saunders, he was seized for debt, with the borrower’s own stud, and sold before his owner could be communicated with. Two of Astley’s company, happening shortly afterwards to be perambulating the streets of the metropolis, were surprised to see Billy harnessed to a cart. They could scarcely believe their eyes, but could doubt no longer when the animal, on receiving a signal to which he was accustomed, pricked up his ears, and began to caper and curvet in a manner seldom seen out of the circle. His new owner was found in a public-house, and was not unwilling to part with him, as Billy, ‘though a main good-tempered creature,’ as he told the equestrians, ‘is so full o’ all manner of tricks that we calls him the Mountebank.’ Saunders, at this time a prisoner for debt in the now demolished Fleet Prison, was well known as a showman and equestrian for three quarters of a century. Many who remember him as the proprietor of a travelling circus, visiting the fairs throughout the south of England, are not aware that he once had a lease of the old Royalty Theatre, and that in 1808 he opened, as a circus, the concert-rooms afterwards known as the Queen’s Theatre, now the Prince of Wales’s. After experiencing many vicissitudes, he fell in his old age into poverty, owing to two heavy losses, namely, by the burning of the Royalty Theatre, and by the drowning of fifteen horses at sea, the vessel in which they were being transported being wrecked in a storm. In his latter years, he was the proprietor of a penny ‘gaff’ at Haggerstone, and, being prosecuted for keeping it, drove to Worship Street police-court in a box on wheels, drawn by a Shetland pony, and presented himself before the magistrate in a garment made of a bearskin. He was then in his ninetieth year, and died two years afterwards, in a miserable lodging in Mill Street, Lambeth Walk.