We have now established half-mile races for our two-year-olds, as, with some few exceptions, the most important events of our English turf—our very Derbys and St. Legers—are but a scramble of a dozen furlongs, with little more than the weight of a child on a _very_ young horse’s back. With all the forcing by which art strives to expel nature, it returns, in this instance, as Horace says, literally with a stablefork,[3] we cannot get an animal to its prime at three years old, who ought not to arrive at maturity till twice that age. Still we continue to breed more and more for a “turn of speed,” utterly regardless of endurance, till our famous English racehorses have degenerated into such galloping “weeds,” that I myself heard an excellent sportsman and high authority on such matters affirm, in discussing the hounds-and-horses match, which was to have come off last October, that “he did not believe there was a horse at Newmarket that could get four miles _at all_; no, not if you trotted him every yard of the way!” Footnote 3: “Naturam expellas _furcâ_, tamen usque recurret.” This, of course, was a jest; but, like many a random shaft pointed with a sarcasm and winged with a laugh, it struck not very far off the centre of the target. Even our hunters, too (and surely, if you want endurance in any animal alive, it is in a hunter), we are _improving_, year by year, into a sort of jumping camelopard. Where are the strong, deep-girthed horses on short legs of thirty years ago? horses that stood just under sixteen hands, and could carry sixteen stone. Look at what people call a first-class hunter now! (and it must be admitted that, for the high price he commands in the market, he ought to be as near perfection as possible.) Look at him, as you may see him in fifty different specimens with the Pytchley or Quorn hounds, any hunting-day throughout the winter! He is a bay or a brown—if the latter, more of a chocolate than a mottled, with white about his legs and nose. He stands sixteen two at least, with much daylight underneath him. He has either a very long weak neck, with a neat head; or more often a good deal of front and throat, with a general bull-headed appearance, that conveys the idea of what sailors term “by the bows,” and argues a tendency to hard pulling, which, to do him justice, he generally possesses. He has fine sloping shoulders, and can stride away in excellent form over a grass-field, reaching out famously with his fore legs, which, though long, are flat, clean, and good. Somehow you are rather disappointed with him when you get on his back. With no positive fault to find, you have yet an uncomfortable conviction that he does _not feel like it_; and, for all his commanding height, you are subjected to no irresistible temptation to “lark” him. When Mr. Coper asks you three hundred and takes “two fifty,” as he calls it, alleging the scarcity of horses, the excellence of this particular specimen, his own unbounded liberality,