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As the Bible makes a favourite of the horse, the patriarch, and the prophet, and the evangelist, and the apostle, stroking his sleek hide, and patting his rounded neck, and tenderly lifting his exquisitely-formed hoof, and listening with a thrill to the champ of his bit, so all great natures in all ages have spoken of him in encomiastic terms. Virgil in his Georgics almost seems to plagiarise from this description in the text, so much are the descriptions alike — the description of Virgil and the description of Job. The Duke of Wellington would not allow anyone irreverently to touch his old war horse Copenhagen, on whom he had ridden fifteen hours without dismounting at Waterloo; and when old Copenhagen died, his master ordered a military salute to be fired over his grave. John Howard showed that he did not exhaust his sympathies in pitying the human race, for when ill he writes home, "Has my old chaise horse become sick or spoiled?" There is hardly any passage of French literature more pathetic than the lamentation over the death of the war charger Marchegay. Walter Scott had so much admiration for this Divinely honoured creature of God, that, in St. Ronan's Well, he orders the girth to be slackened and the blanket thrown over the smoking flanks. Edmund Burke, walking in the park at Beaconsfield, musing over the past, throws his arms around the worn-out horse of his dead son Richard, and weeps upon the horse's neck, the horse seeming to sympathise in the memories. Rowland Hill, the great English preacher, was caricatured because in his family prayer he supplicated for the recovery of a sick horse; but when the horse got well, contrary to all the prophecies of the farriers, the prayer did not seem quite so much of an absurdity.

(T. De Witt Talmage.)

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KJV: Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?

WEB: "Have you given the horse might? Have you clothed his neck with a quivering mane?