CHAPTER XXIX.

REAL HORSES.

A horse in the highway is simply a horse and nothing more; but, transferred to the theatre, the noble animal becomes a real horse.  The distinction is necessary in order that there may be no confusing the works of nature with the achievements of the property-maker.  Not that this indispensable dramatic artist shrinks from competition.  But he would not have ascribed to him the production of another manufactory, so to say.  His business is in counterfeits; he views with some disdain a genuine article.  When the famous elephant Chunee stepped upon the stage of Covent Garden, the chief performer in the pantomime of “Harlequin and Padmanaba, or the Golden Fish,” the creature was but scornfully regarded by Mr. Johnson, the property-man of Drury Lane.  “I should be very sorry,” he cried, “if I could not make a better elephant than that!” And it would seem that he afterwards justified his pretensions, especially in the eyes of the playgoers prizing imitative skill above mere reality.  We read in the parody of Coleridge, in “Rejected Addresses”: 

    Amid the freaks that modern fashion sanctions,
    It grieves me much to see live animals
    Brought on the stage.  Grimaldi has his rabbit,
    Laurent his cat, and Bradbury his pig;
    Fie on such tricks!  Johnson, the machinist,
    Of former Drury, imitated life
    Quite to the life!  The elephant in Blue Beard,
    Stuffed by his hand, wound round his lithe proboscis
    As spruce as he who roared in Padmanaba.

But no doubt an artificial elephant is more easily to be fabricated than an artificial horse.  We do not encounter real elephants at every turn with which to compare the counterfeit.  The animal is of bulky proportions and somewhat ungainly movements.  With a frame of wicker-work and a hide of painted canvas, the creature can be fairly represented.  But a horse is a different matter.  Horses abound, however, and have proved themselves, time out of mind, apt pupils.  They can readily be trained and taught to perform all kinds of feats and antics.  So the skill of the property-maker is not taxed.  He stands on one side, and permits the real horse to enter upon the mimic scene.

When Don Adriano de Armado, the fantastical Spaniard of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” admits that he is “ill at reckoning,” and cannot tell “how many is one thrice told,” his page Moth observes “how easy it is to put years to the word three, and study three years in two words, the dancing horse will tell you.”  This is without doubt an allusion to a horse called Marocco, trained by its master, one Banks, a Scotchman, to perform various strange tricks.  Marocco, a young bay nag of moderate size, was exhibited in Shakespeare’s time in the courtyard of the Belle Sauvage Inn, on Ludgate Hill, the spectators lining the galleries of the hostelry.  A pamphlet, published in 1595,