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In later times, horses have been taught to dance. In the carousals of Louis XIII. there were dances of horses; and in the 13th century, some rode a horse upon a rope. All this eclipses the puny modern feats of Astley and Ducrow. The Greeks and Romans were divided upon the propriety of dancing.
With the exception of Ducrow, who can scarcely be classed among them, who ever knew a rider at Astley’s, or saw him but on horseback? Can our friend in the military uniform ever appear in threadbare attire, or descend to the comparatively un-wadded costume of every-day life? Impossible! We cannot—we will not—believe it.
Ducrow honly because his feelin's wouldn't allow him to keep him no longer after the death of the first Mrs. D., who invariably rode him. "And why's that?" asked Captain Walker. "Why is he safer on Sundays than other days?" "BECAUSE THERE'S NO MUSIC in the streets on Sundays.
If I ever have the honour to meet you again at the Ducrow Arms, I will enter more fully into this part of my view of the injuries inflicted on the stage by Shakspeare.
Mills the actress for the queen of the gipsies; and she gave us a famous good song, Rochfort, you know and then there was two children upon an ass damme, I don't know how they came there, for they're things one sees every day and belonged only to two of the soldiers' wives for we had the whole band of the Staffordshire playing at dinner, and we had some famous glees and Fawcett gave us his laughing song, and then we had the launching of the ship, and only it was a boat, it would have been well enough but damme, the song of Polly Oliver was worth the whole except the Flemish Hercules, Ducrow, you know, dressed in light blue and silver, and Miss Portman, I wish you had seen this three great coach-wheels on his chin, and a ladder and two chairs and two children on them and after that, he sported a musquet and bayonet with the point of the bayonet on his chin faith! that was really famous!
A man, disposed to write comparisons of characters, might, for instance, find some striking analogies between mountebank Murat, with his irresistible bravery and horsemanship, who was a kind of mixture of Dugueselin and Ducrow, and Mountebank David, a fierce, powerful painter and genius, whose idea of beauty and sublimity seemed to have been gained from the bloody melodramas on the Boulevard.
It was not a ‘Royal Amphitheatre’ in those days, nor had Ducrow arisen to shed the light of classic taste and portable gas over the sawdust of the circus; but the whole character of the place was the same, the pieces were the same, the clown’s jokes were the same, the riding-masters were equally grand, the comic performers equally witty, the tragedians equally hoarse, and the ‘highly-trained chargers’ equally spirited.
And on these occasions the frolics, the gestures, were past all description; standing at one corner, her fore feet stretched out, she would appear to wait for the pretty little son who trotted up to her; when, in a moment, almost so as to elude sight, she would bound completely over him, and take her stand at another corner; then back again, and round and round, till it seemed to me that all the tricks taught by Ducrow, the waltzing and quadrilling excepted, must have been suggested by watching the movements of wild horses.
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