The war-horse of the late unpleasantness has been chiseled and painted in many attitudes--especially that of unsupported suspension in the atmosphere, with extended nose and carefully adjusted legs. Sheridan's horse, propelled down the wild, disheveled turnpike by "a terrible oath" at the rate of five (5) miles per stanza, hangs to the canvas in a posture unnatural as that of some artillery steed swung by the breeching from a tree after a caisson explosion. The war-horse has been sufficiently pictured and carved. But he still lacks his literary limner. Almost the sole description of him now accessible is that left by the versatile Orpheus C. Kerr. There is embodied an analysis of that celebrated Gothic steed presented to this Orpheus by his maiden aunt and endeared to the saline affections of the mackerel brigade by several amiable idiosyncrasies. Of whom it is written:
"The beast is fourteen hands high, fourteen hands long, and his sagacious head is shaped like an old-fashioned pickax. Viewed from the rear his style of architecture is Gothic, and has a gable end to which his tail is attached. His eyes are two pearls set in mahogany, and before he lost his sight were said to be brilliant." And more to the same effect, intimating a diet of shoe pegs for oats and saw-dust for millstuffs, save in the rare occasions when he could set his inflexible teeth into a hay bale with unadulterated joy.
Now, shall such of our children's children as through poverty or other crime may be debarred admission to war cycloramas be condemned to surfeit their hunger for knowledge as to the conflict's equestrian features with job lots of descriptive pinxit like this? Is the war charger to be cut off thus with no extra allowance for training or pedigree? Are nice distinctions of gait, between the singlefoot trot and the rack, which are manifestly matters of original brain power and painful culture, modified of course by heredity, to be studiously ignored? In short, is the horse to be thus dismissed into obliquity, so to speak? If so, what conclusions will posterity deduce as to the anatomical development of the speechless inferior Mule? If an animal of fair social position and tenacious of his rank is to be thus lightly disposed of, what can we claim for one of no rank whatever, with only the snap of his teeth and the whisk of his tail to attract attention? The case is critical.