_Mr. Fax._ Horses are noble and useful animals; but as they must necessarily exist in great numbers for almost every purpose of human intercourse and business, it is desirable that none should be kept for purposes of mere idleness and ostentation. A pleasure-horse is a sort of four-footed sinecurist. _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ Not quite so mischievous as a two-footed one. _Mr. Forester._ Perhaps not: but the latter has always a large retinue of the former, and therefore the evil is doubled. _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ Upon my word, Forester, you will almost talk me out of my barouche, and then what will become of me? What shall I do to kill time? _Mr. Forester._ Read ancient books, the only source of permanent happiness left in this degenerate world. _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ Read ancient books! That may be very good advice to some people: but you forget that I have been at college, and _finished_ my _education_. By the bye I have one inside, a portable advocate for my proceedings, no less a personage than old Pindar. _Mr. Forester._ Pindar has written very fine odes on driving, as Anacreon has done on drinking; but the first can no more be adduced to prove the morality of the whip, than the second to demonstrate the virtue of intemperance. Besides, as to the mental tendency and emulative associations of the pursuit itself, no comparison can be instituted between the charioteers of the Olympic games and those of our turnpike roads; for the former were the emulators of heroes and demigods, and the latter of grooms and mail coachmen. _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ Well, Forester, as I recall to mind the various subjects against which I have heard you declaim, I will make you a promise. When ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate the temperance and humility of the founder of that religion by which they feed and flourish: when the man in place acts on the principles which he professed while he was out: when borough electors will not sell their suffrage, nor their representatives their votes: when poets are not to be hired for the maintenance of any opinion: when learned divines can afford to have a conscience: when universities are not a hundred years in knowledge behind all the rest of the world: when young ladies speak as they think, and when those who shudder at a tale of the horrors of slavery will deprive their own palates of a sweet taste, for the purpose of contributing all in their power to its extinction:—why then, Forester, I will lay down my barouche. CHAPTER XXV THE WALK