Beyond this, the race-horse proper has also a
similarly non-industrial but honorific use as a gambling
instrument.
The fast horse, then, is aesthetically fortunate, in that the
canon of pecuniary good repute legitimates a free
appreciation of whatever beauty or serviceability he may possess.
His pretensions have the countenance of the principle of
conspicuous waste and the backing of the predatory aptitude for
dominance and emulation. The horse is, moreover, a beautiful
animal, although the race-horse is so in no peculiar degree to
the uninstructed taste of those persons who belong neither in the
class of race-horse fanciers nor in the class whose sense of
beauty is held in abeyance by the moral constraint of the horse
fancier's award. To this untutored taste the most beautiful horse
seems to be a form which has suffered less radical alteration
than the race-horse under the breeder's selective development of
the animal. Still, when a writer or speaker -- especially of
those whose eloquence is most consistently commonplace wants an
illustration of animal grace and serviceability, for rhetorical
use, he habitually turns to the horse; and he commonly makes it
plain before he is done that what he has in mind is the
race-horse.
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