George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[477] But I find it very hard reading, so ill is it written. Still, it contains a great many new facts, and much careful investigation. I hope he will not make out a case against the Dresden Madonna, for it is surely a magnificent picture, and should not be slightly dispossessed of its prescriptive rights. Probably I am prejudiced about it; but, if I am, I can't help it, and am not ashamed of it. . . . . Kindest and most faithful regards to Lady Head and yourself, and love to the children from all of us. Tell me about them.

Yours ever,

Geo. Ticknor.

Thinking over the matter of the moreno, and your question whether I knew any other case in which the color of the horse is put, in Spanish, for the horse himself, I turned to a poor ballad by Jacinto Polo de Medina, in the beginning of his third Academia. It is on the old subject of a game of cañas, and is (of course almost) intended as a compliment to the different persons who figure in it. The first who comes in is Don Jorge Bernal,—

En un bayo, cabos negros,
Que en una andaluza yegua
Engendro el viento ec./quote>

Another is Don Francisco de Berastegui, who

encomienda
Al viento un rucio,

and later,—

Ocupo Don Salvador
Carillo (gloria suprema)
Un alacvan que à los vientos
A saber correr ensefia.

Indeed, I have little doubt that the mere word for color was used in Spanish to indicate the horse, as often as we use sorrel, etc.; and I shall never forget how full half a century ago, in the Reit-bahn at Gottingen, I used to be delighted when the Stall-meister called out, ‘Der Schimmel fur den Herrn Ticknor,’ because a gray horse was the best in the large establishment. In short, must it not be the same in all languages? . . . .

To Sir Edmund Head, London.

Brookline, August 2, 1867.

my dear Head,—You are a day in advance of me, but no more; for I laid out your last letter yesterday to answer it, and in the evening