ns of
reputability. In this country, for instance, leisure-class tastes are
to some extent shaped on usages and habits which prevail, or which are
apprehended to prevail, among the leisure class of Great Britain. In
dogs this is true to a less extent than in horses. In horses, more
particularly in saddle horses--which at their best serve the purpose of
wasteful display simply--it will hold true in a general way that a
horse is more beautiful in proportion as he is more English; the English
leisure class being, for purposes of reputable usage, the upper leisure
class of this country, and so the exemplar for the lower grades. This
mimicry in the methods of the apperception of beauty and in the forming
of judgments of taste need not result in a spurious, or at any rate not
a hypocritical or affected, predilection. The predilection is as serious
and as substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as
when it rests on any other, the difference is that this taste is and
as substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as when it
rests on any other; the difference is that this taste is a taste for the
reputably correct, not for the aesthetically true.

The mimicry, it should be said, extends further than to the sense of
beauty in horseflesh simply. It includes trappings and horsemanship as
well, so that the correct or reputably beautiful seat or posture is also
decided by English usage, as well as the equestrian gait. To show how
fortuitous may sometimes be the circumstances which decide what shall
be becoming and what not under the pecuniary canon of beauty, it may be
noted that this English seat, and the peculiarly distressing gait which
has made an awkward seat necessary, are a survival from the time when
the English roads were so bad with mire and mud as to be virtually
impassable for a horse travelling at a more comfortable gait; so that
a person of decorous tastes in horsemanship today rides a punch with
docked tail, in an uncomfortable posture and at a distressing gait,
because the English roads during a great part of the last century were
impassable for a horse travelling at a more horse-like gait, or for
an animal built for moving with ease over the firm and open country to
which the horse is indigenous. It is not only with respect to consumable
goods--including domestic animals--that the canons of taste have been
colored by the canons of pecuniary reputability. Something to the like
effect is