The tired ploughman, steeped in luxurious heat, by and by falls asleep and dreams sweetly until his chilblains or the snapping fire awakes him, and he pulls himself up and goes forth yawning to give his team their last feed, his lantern throwing a feeble gleam on the snow as he makes his way to the stable.  Having completed his task, he pats the sides of those he loves best by way of good-night, and leaves them to their fragrant meal.  And this kindly action on his part suggests one of the best passages of the poem.  Even old well-fed Dobbin occasionally rebels against his slavery, and released from his chains will lift his clumsy hoofs and kick, “disdainful of the dirty wheel.”  Short-sighted Dobbin!

   Thy chains were freedom, and thy toils repose,
   Could the poor post-horse tell thee all his woes;
   Show thee his bleeding shoulders, and unfold
   The dreadful anguish he endures for gold;
   Hired at each call of business, lust, or rage,
   That prompts the traveller on from stage to stage. 
   Still on his strength depends their boasted speed;
   For them his limbs grow weak, his bare ribs bleed;
   And though he groaning quickens at command,
   Their extra shilling in the rider’s hand
   Becomes his bitter scourge . . . .

The description, too long to quote, which follows of the tortures inflicted on the post-horse a century ago, is almost incredible to us, and we flatter ourselves that such things would not be tolerated now.  But we must get over the ground somehow, and I take it that but for the invention of other more rapid means of transit the present generation would be as little concerned at the pains of the post-horse as they are at the horrors enacted behind the closed doors of the physiological laboratories, the atrocity of the steel trap, the continual murdering by our big game hunters of all the noblest animals left on the globe, and finally the annual massacre of millions of beautiful birds in their breeding time to provide ornaments for the hats of our women.

“Come forth he must,” says Bloomfield, when he describes how the flogged horse at length gains the end of the stage and, “trembling under complicated pains,” when “every nerve a separate anguish knows,” he is finally unharnessed and led to the stable door, but has scarcely tasted food and rest before he is called for again.

                     Though limping, maimed and sore;
   He hears the whip; the chaise is at the door . . . 
   The collar tightens and again he feels
   His half-healed wounds inflamed; again the wheels
   With tiresome sameness in his ears resound
   O’er blinding dust or miles of flinty ground.

This is over and done with simply because the post-horse is no longer wanted, and we have to remember that no form of cruelty inflicted, whether for sport or profit or from some other motive, on the lower animals has ever died out of itself in the land.  Its end has invariably been brought about by legislation through the devotion of men who were the “cranks,” the “faddists,” the “sentimentalists,” of their day, who were jeered and laughed at by their fellows, and who only succeeded by sheer tenacity and force of character after long fighting against public opinion and a reluctant Parliament, in finally getting their law.