De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about Wordsworth and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian.  He describes a forty-mile all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, on the evening after first meeting Coleridge.  He could not sleep after the intellectual excitement of the day, and through a summer night “divinely calm” he busied himself with meditation on the sad spectacle he had witnessed:  a great mind hastening to decay.

I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much practised before the eighteenth century.  We know from Ambassador Jusserand’s famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the fourteenth century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures of moving meditation and scenery.  We can gather from Mr. Tristram’s “Coaching Days and Coaching Ways” that the highroads were by no means safe for solitary travellers even so late as 1750.  In “Joseph Andrews” (1742) whenever any of the characters proceed afoot they are almost certain to be held up.  Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was a considerable rambler a century earlier than this, and in his Derbyshire hills must have passed many lonely gullies; but footpads were more likely to ambush the main roads.  It would be a hardhearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of his basket of trouts.  Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped it over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more baggage than a flute:  he might have written “The Handy Guide for Beggars” long before Vachel Lindsay.  But generally speaking, it is true that cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth.  I always think of him as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy.

After Wordsworth they come thick and fast.  Hazlitt, of course—­have you paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who have not read Hazlitt’s “On Going A Journey?” Then Keats:  never was there more fruitful walk than the early morning stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October, 1816, that produced “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold.”  He must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on Cowden Clarke’s table by breakfast time.  And by the way, did you know that the copy of Chapman’s Homer which inspired it belonged to the financial editor of the Times?  Never did financial editor live to better purpose!

There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the walker:  get these by rote in some membrane of memory: 

The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters:  the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown—­the Air is our robe of state—­the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel playing before it.

The Victorians were great walkers.  Railways were but striplings; inns were at their prime.  Hark to the great names in the walker’s Hall of Fame: