their exercise, Mr Faubert having newly railed in a manège, and fitted
it for the academy. There were the Dukes of Norfolk and Northumberland,
Lord Newburgh, and a nephew of (Duras) Earl of Feversham.... But the
Duke of Norfolk told me he had not been at this exercise these twelve
years before."[261] However, Faubert's could not have been an important
institution, since in 1700, a certain Dr Maidwell tried to get the
Government to convert a great house of his near Westminster into a
public academy of the French sort, as a greatly needed means of rearing
gentlemen.[262]

But all these efforts to educate English boys on the lines of French
ones came to nothing, because at the close of the seventeenth century
Englishmen began to realize that it was not wise for a gentleman to
confine himself to a military life. As to riding as a fine art, his
practical mind felt that it was all very well to amuse oneself in Paris
by learning to make a war-horse caracole, but there was no use in taking
such things too seriously; that in war "a ruder way of riding was more
in use, without observing the precise rules of riding the great
horse."[263] He could not feel that artistic passion for form in
horsemanship which breathes from the pages of Pluvinel's book _Le
Maneige Royal_[264] in which magnificent engravings show Louis XIII.
making courbettes, voltes, and "caprioles" around the Louvre, while a
circle of grandees gravely discuss the deportment of his charger. Even
Sir Philip Sidney made gentle fun of the hippocentric universe of his
Italian riding master:

"When the right vertuous Edward Wotton, and I, were at the Emperors
Court together, wee gave ourselves to learne horsemanship of John Pietro
Pugliano: one that with great commendation had the place of an esquire
in his stable. And hee, according to the fertilnes of the Italian wit,