Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1883 — Men and Horses of Former Times. [ARTICLE]

Men and Horses of Former Times.

Mr. Gladstone is credited with having said that every symptom indicative of a nation which has seen its best days and is now slowly settling, may be discerned on every side of us at this moment. That there is far less vigor and endurance in ordinary men and ordinary horses than existed at the commencement of the century is so apparent that none but the very young and very thoughtless can be blind to the fact. We find in the “Life of Lord Chancellor Campbell” that, in 1840, when he was 31 years old, he wanted to get from Stafford, where he was on circuit, to London with the least possible delay. “My plan,” he writes to his father, “was to go in a chaise to Wolverhampton and then to take the stagecoach; but there was no chaise to be had at Stafford, and I was forced to set off on foot. The distance is sixteen miles, which I performed in less than four hours. At Wolverhampton I found the London coach ready to start, and, passing through Birmingham, Strat-ford-oa-Avon and Oxford, I reached the Temple next day at 2p.m. ” How many young barristers of to-day would be fit for a hard * afternoon’s work after going through such an ordeal ? A stillliving veteran upon the stage, Mr. Chippendale, remembers the time when, as a young actor, he occasionally had to walk forty miles in a day from town to town and to play at night for the noble stipend of 25 shillings a week. Sixty or seventy years ago such famous huntsmen as Squire Osbaldeston or the late Lord Lichfield endured, in getting to the covert side, fatigue and hardship which none but a madman would now think of facing. Lord Lichfield, when master of the Warwickshire hounds, would take his seat on a Sunday by the coachman’s side, at 8 p. m., upon the box of the Birmingham “Greyhound,” and. traveling all night, would arrive at Coventry about 6 a. m. on Monday. Having washed, put on his huntingclothes and breakfasted, he would ride perhaps twenty miles to meet his hounds, hunt all day, and, upon more than one occasion, return from Coventry to London on Tuesday night by the up-coach. When Squire Osbaldeston was master of the Quorn and Oakley hounds at the same time, his days were often passed in hunting and his nights in galloping from one pack to the other. The horses bestridden and ridden by these iron-framed sportsmen were, like their riders and drivers, more enduring than the animals now sold at Tattersail’s.—London Field.