ls the story of the connubial
ride:--"We came down a foul hill, my master riding behind my mistress."
"Both on one horse?" says Curtis, apparently unacquainted with the
fashion of pillions. "What's that to thee?" rejoins Grumio. "Tell thou
the tale. But hadst thou not crossed me, thou shouldst have heard how
her horse fell, and she under her horse; thou shouldst have heard in how
miry a place; how she was bemoiled; how he left her with the horse upon
her; how he beat me because her horse stumbled; how she waded through the
dirt to pluck him off me; how he swore; how she prayed; how I cried; how
the horses ran away; how her bridle was burst; how I lost my crupper."

That Petruchio rode a hired horse is rendered probable by the wretched
character of his steed and its furniture. Hudibras or Don Quixote were
not worse mounted than was the Shrew-tamer: seeing that his horse was
"hipped with an old mothy saddle, the stirrups of no kindred; besides,
possessed with the glanders, and like to mose in the chine; troubled with
the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped with
spavins, raied with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled
with the staggers, begnawn with the bots; swayed in the back and
shoulder-shotten, near-legged before, and with a half-checked bit, and a
headstall of sheep's leather; which, being restrained to keep him from
stumbling, hath been often burst, and now repaired with knots; one girt
six times pieced, and a woman's crupper of velure, here and there pieced
with packthread." {30}

Steele (Tatler, No. 231) has borrowed, without any acknowledgement, from
'Taming the Shrew,' most of the circumstances of his story; yet his
adoption of them shows that such a mode of travelling was still in common
use in the seventeenth century. After the honey-moon was over, the
bridegroom made preparations for conveying his new spouse to her future
abode. But "instead of a coach and six horses, together with the gay
equipage suitable to the occasion, he appeared without a servant, mounted
on a skeleton of a horse which his huntsman had, the day before, brought
in to feast his dogs on the arrival of their new mistress, with a pillion
fixed behind, and a case of pistols before him, attended only by a
favourite hound. Thus equipped, he, in a very obliging, but somewhat
positive manner, desired his lady to seat herself on the cushion; which
done, away they crawled. The road being obstructed b