at, or
team is successful: the sport is the thing that counts; the
strenuousness of the contest is what stimulates and evokes the
rapturous applause. At such a moment it is good to be alive. Scenes
similar to those hinted at may be witnessed on any sports-field or
racetrack in our dear little Emerald Isle almost any day of the year.
All is good fellowship; all is in the cause of sport.

No one can question that in some departments of horse-racing Ireland
is today supreme. The Irish devotion to the horse is of no recent
growth. Everybody knows how, in the dim and distant days when King
Conor macNessa ruled at Emain, the war-steeds of the Ultonians
neighed loudly in their stalls on the first dramatic appearance of
Cuchulainn of Muirthemne at the northern court. Cuchulainn's own two
steeds, Liath Macha, "the Roan of Macha", and Dub Sainglenn, "Black
Sanglan", are celebrated in story and song:

Never hoofs like them shall ring,
Rapid as the winds of spring.

To read of the performances of Cuchulainn and his war-horses and his
charioteer and friend, Laeg macRiangahra, at the famous battle of
Rosnaree, and again at the last fight between the Red Branch Knights
and the forces of Queen Medb of Connacht, does truly, in the words
used by Sir Philip Sidney in another connection, stir the heart like
the sound of a trumpet.

As time went on, the Irish war-horse became more and more famous, and
always carried his rider in gallant style. Stout was the steed that,
bestridden by Godfrey O'Donnell at the battle of Credan-Kille,
withstood the shock of Lord Maurice Fitzgerald's desperate onslaught,
and by his steadiness enabled the Tyrconnell chieftain to strike
senseless and unhorse his fierce Norman foe. More celebrated still
was the high-spirited animal which Art MacMurrogh rode in 1399 to his
ineffectual parley with King Richard the Second's representative, the
Earl of Gloucester. The French chronicler who was a witness of that
historic scene tells us that a horse more exquisitely beautiful, more
marvellously fleet, he had never seen. "In coming down," he says, "it
galloped so hard that, in my opinion, I never saw hare, deer, sheep,
or any other animal, I declare to you for a certainty, run with such
speed as it did." Edmund Spenser, the poet of _The Faerie Queene_,
writing in 1596, bears this striking testimony to the Irish
horse-soldier and inferentially to the Irish horse: "I have hearde
some greate warriours say,