More, he was a Christian to his horses.

How about Murat in that respect?
Lord Ormont cared for his men: did Murat so particularly much?
And he was as cunning fronting odds, and a thunderbolt at the charge.

Why speak of him in the past?
He is an English lord, a lord by birth, and he is alive; things may be expected of him to-morrow or next day.
Shalders here cut Matey short by meanly objecting to that.
"Men are mortal," he said, with a lot of pretended stuff, deploring our human condition in the elegy strain; and he fell to reckoning the English hero's age--as that he, Lord Ormont, had been a name in the world for the last twenty-five years or more.

The noble lord could be no chicken.

We are justified in calculating, by the course of nature, that his term of activity is approaching, or has approached, or, in fact, has drawn to its close.
"If your estimate, sir, approaches to correctness," rejoined Matey--tellingly, his comrades thought.
"Sixty, as you may learn some day, is a serious age, Matthew Weyburn." Matey said he should be happy to reach it with half the honours Lord Ormont had won.
"Excepting the duels," Shalders had the impudence to say.
"If the cause is a good one!" cried Matey.
"The cause, or Lord Ormont has been maligned, was reprehensible in the extremest degree." Shalders cockhorsed on his heels to his toes and back with a bang.
"What was the cause, if you please, sir ?" a boy, probably naughty, inquired; and as Shalders did not vouchsafe a reply, the bigger boys knew.
They revelled in the devilish halo of skirts on the whirl encircling Lord Ormont's laurelled head.
That was a spark in their blood struck from a dislike of the tone assumed by Mr.Shalders to sustain his argument; with his "men are mortal," and talk of a true living champion as "no chicken," and the wordy drawl over "justification for calculating the approach of a close to a term of activity"-- in the case of a proved hero! Guardians of boys should make sure that the boys are on their side before they raise the standard of virtue.