plight of Livia and Candius (i. 3, p. 55), says satirically, 'God give you joy, Candius: I was worth the bidding to dinner, though not worthy to be of the counsell' and Shakespeare, using the same dramatic motive of opposition between youthful inclination and parental wish, and the same dramatic interruption, makes Polixenes tell Florizel— 'Methinks a father Is at the nuptial of his son a guest and urge his right to hold some counsel in such a business.' The suppressed wrath of Prisius' 'Soft, Livia, take me with you' (p. 85), is exactly repeated in Capulet's 'Soft! take me with you,' in regard to Juliet's opposition; and the dénouement of the play, turning on marks of the person, bears some resemblance to that of Cymbeline.' Lastly, Lyly's complaint in the Prologue to 'Campaspe,' that an author, like a torch, consumes himself in giving light to others, is paralleled near the beginning of 'Measure for Measure' by the lines which declare that such is the divine intention. Of these resemblances which suggest themselves to us, a few were noted by Fairholt and others, a few more by the lateMr. J. A. Symonds in his work on 'Shakespeare's Predecessors.' The latter, alone among recent critics, appears to us to recognise in any adequate degree the originality of Lyly's work. We hail in Lyly the first of English writers to pay systematic attention to prose style; the first to take the bold step of picturing the modern rather than the antique; the first to write plays at once cleanly, coherent, bright, and smooth; the first to present to us on the stage woman in all her charm of grace and wit and laughter; the first to utilize and insist on love and love-making as the grand perennial source of interest in fiction; the first founder, finally, of that college of witcrackers' whose daring gaiety has lightened for Englishmen the weight and seriousness of life from the days of Congreve and Sheridan to those of our own. Mille habet ornatus, mille decenter habet. Thick as lies the dust of oblivion on the life and work of John Lyly, wide as is the gulf that separates this old Elizabethan from ourselves, it is to his initiative that we are indebted for many a characteristic of our modern literature, it is in him that we may recognize the first faint glimmerings of the spirit of to-day. ART. ART. VI.—1. Gli Ordini di Cavalcare. Del Federigo Grisone. Naples, 1550. 2. The Foure Chiefyst Offices belongyng to Horsemanshippe. By Thomas Blundevile. London, 1565. 3. Le Maneige Royal. Par Antoine Pluvinel. Paris, 1623. 4. The Manner of Feeding, Dressing, and Training of Horses, Sc. By William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle. London, 1658. 5. École de Cavalerie. Par Fr. Robichon de la Guerinière. Paris, 1733. 6. The History and Art of Horsemanship. By Richard Berenger. London, 1771. IN art. N the following pages it is proposed to discuss what the foxhunter or the steeplechase rider might call the pedantry of horsemanship, and to treat riding not as a sport, but as an A better title than the Art of Horsemanship' would perhaps have been the Art of the Manège' or 'The Haute École.' But both these expressions might have given rise to the mistaken idea that we were about to deal with a purely French system of training the horse, whereas, as we hope to show, the French have learnt as much from us in the past as we from them, while both of us are deeply indebted to the Italians of the Renaissance. If France can point to the names of her great horsemen La Broue, Pluvinel, and Guerinière-we can with equal pride and justice claim that our Blundevile wrote his 'Foure Chiefyst Offices belongyng to Horsemanshippe' nearly twenty-eight years before Solomon de La Broue produced his 'Cavelerice François' in 1593, and that John Astley brought out his 'Art of Riding' (founded upon Il Cavalerizzo of Claudio Corte) in 1584, thirty-nine years before the superb 'Maneige Royal' of Antoine Pluvinel appeared in 1623. But it were sufficient to rest the case for our originality entirely upon the masterpiece of the Marquis of Newcastle. The fact is that horsemanship as an art has always been cosmopolitan and eclectic. Born originally in Greece, it had its renascence in Italy, and Grisoni and Fiaschi must be acknowledged the true fathers of the art, however ready we may be to admit that the Courts of Francis I. and Henry IV., by early adoption of the offspring, adorned its development with the courtly grace, lustre, and urbanity of French influence which made the manège the art of princes, as another nation and age made hawking the sport of kings. . They 6 They say,' wrote Ben Jonson, Princes learn no Art truly, but the Art of Horsemanship. The reason is, the brave Beast is no flatterer. He will throw a Prince as soon as his groom.' The Greek theory of education, as we find it in Plato, was of a twofold kind: one of gymnastics relating to the body, the other of music for the sake of a good state of the soul' briefly, as Mr. Pater expresses it, a gymnastic fused in music. This system of education the Greeks applied no less to the training of horses than of men. In the earliest extant treatise on Riding, Xenophon pointed out that horsemanship, like dancing, was dependent fundamentally on the play-impulse, that for anything to be done well it must be done for pleasure; what the horse does under compulsion is done without understanding, and there is no beauty in it any more than if one should whip and spur a dancer.' The horse must become an artist, too, in his manner, and use his limbs with rhythmical freedom. So far was this carried that Athenæus relates how the Sybarites taught even their horses to dance at their feasts to the music of the flute; and on one occasion their enemies put their knowledge of this habit to humorous account, by taking out flute-players to battle and winning the cavalry over to their side by causing the horses to dance to a favourite air, just as the Pied Piper played the rats of Hameln into the Weser. Xenophon anticipates the later refinements of the manège in another respect, by advocating persuasion and sympathy in training a colt rather than the force and cruelty which prevailed in the early Italian School; but in his directions he does not advance beyond the simple exercises of the circle or volte (as his latest translator renders the word edn) and the career,' although going minutely into the question of changing leg. The only paces of the horse known to the Greeks seem to have been the walk, trot, and gallop. We need merely stop amongst the Romans to observe that the term of riding the great horse' (which was in constant use in England till the eighteenth century to express manège-riding) is borrowed from the Latin magnus equus, and that our word 'canter' is by some derived from the Latin cantherion or packhorse, and not, as by Dr. Johnson, from the pace used by pilgrims riding to Canterbury. The Romans, with their sense of the practical, regarded horsemanship more from the point of view of war and of locomotion. What little attention they gave to the pure art of riding was confined to the circus, and the circus, as we know, soon fell into the hands of professional athletes, when riding, like dancing, came to be regarded as a servile servile art. Yet there was a time when awkwardness on horseback had been as much a reproach to a Roman youth as illiteracy: 'Neque equitare nec literas scire.' One other legacy we have inherited from Roman riding. The game of palus, or pillar-play, which consisted in throwing a lance at a pillar and striking it in a particular place, gave way to the quitana, a development of palus. Hence came to us the mediæval exercise of the 'quintanie,' which to this day survives in the exercise of heads and posts that forms part of the curriculum of our military riding school. The sun of the Roman Empire set, so to speak, in the East, and it is to Byzantium we must turn our eyes for the continuation of the art of horsemanship as of the Fine Arts. In Constantinople accordingly we find that the games were augmented by feats of horsemanship, derived partly from the Arabs, who had for so many centuries idolized their horses, and partly from the Roman Circus; and to these games were joined the French sports known as conflictus Gallici, which were carried on in France in great splendour under Charles the Bold (A.D. 840). It is interesting to note that Italy, which had furnished the Byzantine capital with artists, was in the twelfth century to receive in return some companies of Byzantine circus riders who settled at Naples, which thus became the home of horsemanship during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During the Crusades and throughout the early Middle Ages the references to horsemanship are few and far between. Certain breeds of horses were, it is true, in request, but always with a view to their use in war, and not to their beauty in time of peace. In the thirteenth century Brunetto Latini, in his "Trésor de toutes Choses,' thus speaks of the various breeds of horses in vogue:— Il y a chevaux de plusieurs manières: les uns sont destriers pour le combat; les autres pour chevaucher à l'aise de son corps, sont palefrois (qui s'appelaient aussi ambleurs, haquenées); les autres sont roussins (ou courtauts) pour somme porter.' It was, however, the dawn of chivalry (as its name implies), which, by assuming for its exercises the similitude of war, made riding a new art, thenceforth inseparable from the education of nobility and from gentle breeding. In the Livre des Faits' of the Chevalier Jean le Maingre, Sire de Boucicault, Marshal of France, we catch a glimpse of the position which ornamental horsemanship had reached in France at the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century— century a mélange of vaulting and acrobatic skill. The young gentleman 's'essayait à saillir (sauter) sur un coursier tout armé; item, saillait, sans mettre le pied à l'étrier, sur un coursier armé de toutes pièces; item, à un grand homme monté sur un grand cheval, saillait de terre à chevauchon (califourchon) sur les épaules, en prenant le dit homme par la manche à une main sans autre avantage: item, en mettant une main sur l'arçon de la selle d'un grand coursier, et l'autre emprès les oreilles, le prenait par les crins en pleine terre et saillait de l'autre part de coursier.' In the days of Rabelais, that mirror of mediævalism, horsemanship had already made considerable strides. In the education of Pantagruel, riding was to be a prominent feature from very earliest childhood: first by means of a wooden horse; and later, on reaching years of discretion, under the tuition of an escuyer gymnaste, he is to practise all the feats of horsemanship to which the then evolving manège had attained : And with them a young gentleman of Touraine, named the Esquire Gymnast, who taught him the art of riding. Changing then his clothes, he rode a Naples courser, Dutch Roussin, a Spanish gennet, a barbed or trapped steed, then a light fleet horse, unto whom he gave a hundred Carières, made him go the high saults, bounded in the air, free a ditch with a skip, leap over a stile or pail, turn short in a ring both to the right and left hand. . . . As for the prancing flourishes, and smacking popisms for the better cherishing of the horse, commonly used in riding, none did them better than he. The voltiger of Ferrara was but as an ape compared to him. He was singularly skilful in leaping nimbly from one horse to another without putting foot to ground, and these horses were called desultories. He could likewise from either side, with a lance in his hand, leap on horseback without stirrups, and rate the horse at his pleasure without a bridle, for such things are useful in military engagements.' Not until the year 1539, when the ideas of the Renaissance are mellowing down from their first ferment, do we meet with the establishment of an Academy for instruction in the Art of Horsemanship. The founder was an Italian, Cesare Fiaschi, who soon gained a notoriety all over Italy. His pupil, Pignatelli, carried to a still higher point the work of his master at Naples. He speedily attracted to his academy the leading equerries of the Court of France to learn, and afterwards to introduce into their own country, the pastime destined to become one of the most popular in the courts of kings and princes. Two French noblemen, La Broue and Pluvinel, were amongst the first pupils of Pignatelli, and both on their return *No doubt an allusion to Fiaschi, who was a native of Ferrara. to |