As no home-bred pacer, of any type or breed, has been seen in England for nearly two hundred years, it is not remarkable that Englishmen of good average intelligence, for the past two or three generations, have lived and died supposing they knew all about horses, and yet did not know there had ever been such a thing in England as a breed of pacing horses. When, some eighteen or twenty years ago, I called the attention of Mr. H. F. Euren, compiler of the Hackney Stud Book, to the early English pacers as a most inviting field in which to look for the origin of the “Norfolk Trotters,” he was surprised to learn that such horses had existed in England, but he went to work and gathered up many important facts that appear in the first volume of the Hackney compilation. Many of these facts, but in less detail, had already appeared, from time to time, in _Wallace’s Monthly_, but Mr. Euren’s was the first modern English publication to place them before English readers. From this prompting, Mr. Euren did well, but we must go back a little to see how this subject was treated by English writers of horse books, who wrote without any promptings from this side.
Mr. William Youatt was a voluminous writer on domestic animals, and at one time was looked upon as the highest authority on the horse, both in England and in this country. He seems to have been a practitioner of veterinary surgery, and from the number of volumes which he published successfully, he must have been a man of ability and education. There can be no question that he knew a great deal—quite too much to know anything well. The first edition of his work on the horse was published in 1831, and soon after its appearance several publishing houses in this country seized upon it as very valuable, and each one of them soon had an edition of it before the public. It purports to have been written at the instance of “The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.” This declaration was a good thing, in a commercial view, and no doubt it did much in extending the circulation of the book. Without tarrying to note several minor historical blunders, I will go direct to one relating to the gait of the horse, which is now under consideration. In his fourth edition, page 535, he incidentally discusses the mechanism of the pace, and after speaking of the Elgin Marbles, to which I have referred at the beginning of this chapter, and after conceding that two of the four horses are not galloping but pacing, he says: