ride instead of drive. A great aristocrat, again, must he have been
among those latter races who first conceived the notion of getting on his
horse's back, accommodating his motions to the beast's, and becoming a
centaur, half-man, half-horse. That invention must have tended, in the
first instance, as surely toward democracy as did the invention of
firearms. A tribe of riders must have been always, more or less, equal
and free. Equal because a man on a horse would feel himself a man
indeed; because the art of riding called out an independence, a
self-help, a skill, a consciousness of power, a personal pride and
vanity, which would defy slavery. Free, because a tribe of riders might
be defeated, exterminated, but never enchained. They could never become
_gleboe adscripti_, bound to the soil, as long as they could take horse
and saddle, and away. History gives us more than one glimpse of such
tribes--the scourge and terror of the non-riding races with whom they
came in contact. Some, doubtless, remember how in the wars between
Alfred and the Danes, "the army" (the Scandinavian invaders) again and
again horse themselves, steal away by night from the Saxon infantry, and
ride over the land (whether in England or in France), "doing unspeakable
evil." To that special instinct of horsemanship, which still
distinguishes their descendants, we may attribute mainly the Scandinavian
settlement of the north and east of England. Some, too, may recollect
the sketch of the primeval Hun, as he first appeared to the astonished
and disgusted old Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus; the visages "more
like cakes than faces;" the "figures like those which are hewn out with
an axe on the poles at bridge-ends;" the rat-skin coats, which they wore
till they rotted off their limbs; their steaks of meat cooked between the
saddle and the thigh; the little horses on which "they eat and drink, buy
and sell, and sleep lying forward along his narrow neck, and indulging in
every variety of dream." And over and above, and more important
politically, the common councils "held on horseback, under the authority