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 of no king, but content with the irregular government of nobles, under whose leading they force their way through all obstacles.”  A race—­like those Cossacks who are probably their lineal descendants—­to be feared, to be hired, to be petted, but not to be conquered.

Instances nearer home of free equestrian races we have in our own English borderers, among whom (as Mr. Froude says) the farmers and their farm-servants had but to snatch their arms and spring into their saddles and they became at once the Northern Horse, famed as the finest light cavalry in the world.  And equal to them—­superior even, if we recollect that they preserved their country’s freedom for centuries against the superior force of England—­were those troops of Scots who, century after century, swept across the border on their little garrons, their bag of oatmeal hanging by the saddle, with the iron griddle whereon to bake it; careless of weather and of danger; men too swift to be exterminated, too independent to be enslaved.

But if horsemanship had, in these cases, a levelling tendency it would have the very opposite when a riding tribe conquered a non-riding one.  The conquerors would, as much as possible, keep the art and mystery of horsemanship hereditary among themselves, and become a Ritterschaft or chivalrous caste.  And they would be able to do so:  because the conquered race would not care or dare to learn the new and dangerous art.  There are persons, even in England, who can never learn to ride.  There are whole populations in Europe, even now, when races have become almost indistinguishably mixed, who seem unable to learn.  And this must have been still more the case when the races were more strongly separated in blood and habits.  So the Teutonic chief, with his gesitha, comites, or select band of knights, who had received from him, as Tacitus has it, the war-horse and the lance, established himself as the natural ruler—­and oppressor—­of the non-riding populations; first over the aborigines of Germany proper, tribes who seem to have been enslaved, and their names lost, before the time of Tacitus; and then over the non-riding Romans and Gauls to the South and West, and the Wendish and Sclavonic tribes to the East.  Very few in numbers, but mighty in their unequalled capacity of body and mind, and in their terrible horsemanship, the Teutonic Ritterschaft literally rode roughshod over the old world; never checked, but when they came in contact with the free-riding hordes of the Eastern steppes; and so established an equestrian caste, of which the [Greek text] of Athens and the Equites of Rome had been only hints ending in failure and absorption.