Nature & Animals Quote by William Cavendish

Cavendish is talking horse mechanics, but he’s also quietly advertising authority: a man who can make a powerful animal “throw… upon the haunches” can claim mastery over forces that don’t naturally want to yield. The sentence is dense with specialist confidence. “Method of the pillar” isn’t just a technique; it’s a branded system, a proprietary fix for the unruly, the resistant, the insufficiently shaped. He’s not describing a horse so much as demonstrating that he owns the vocabulary of control.

The intent is practical - improve collection, bend, responsiveness - yet the phrasing smuggles in a worldview. “Effectual” and “always gives him the ply” signal an early modern faith in method: discipline as something you can reliably engineer if you have the right apparatus and the right hand. That “always” is doing a lot of work. It promises repeatability in a realm (animal behavior, training, temperament) that is famously messy. It’s the tone of someone used to command, translating uncertainty into procedure.

Context matters: Cavendish wasn’t merely a horseman; as a public servant and aristocrat, he lived in a culture where horsemanship was politics by other means. Riding wasn’t leisure, it was a visible literacy in order, hierarchy, and war-readiness. The subtext is governance: teach the body to comply, align motion to intention, and you get a creature that looks willing even when it’s been made. “Ply to the side he goes of” is elegance and coercion fused - the art of producing grace on demand.