Shanks's Pony. By Morris Marples. (Dent, 25s.) 'Too rich, too
lazy, and too proud,' was why nobody in England walked, either for pleasure or for profit. So Pastor Moritz was told—and by an Englishman—in the 1780s. But pedestrianism as a sport was already reviving 'in this land of car- riages and horses.' It had once been necessary to walk, and some, such as Coryate, LithgomPand John Taylor, the Water-Poet, had made a virtue of it. Twenty-stone Ben Jonson had walked to Scotland. Soon after Moritz's day, Captain Bar- clay of Ury was breaking Regency records, and Wordsworth was setting a Lake District fashion that urbanised Lancashire still follows. The com- piler of this historical miscellany ranges anecdo- tally from Jonson to Joad in a style painfully pedesuian even for the theme, but there are some good stories and remarkable records. it is hard to be as impressed as the author, though, by the sixteen-year-old de Quincey's feat of walking from Manchester to Chester in two days in the course of his flight from Manchester Grammar School. There must be many a boy of the same age at that nursery of good walkers and climbers who could do the same today, and think nothing
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