144 
ANIMALS IN MOTION. 
A 
-~k 
A 
-A A—A 
o- o— o— 
456 
8 
Had the spring been made from ▲ the landing would, 
of course, have been made on O, the others falling in 
regular order. 
During a slow canter A will sometimes be dis¬ 
covered acting in association with the other three, and 
the curious phase presented of a five-mile gait being 
realized, with all four of the feet in contact with the 
ground at the same instant. 
The earliest reference to the canter in English litera¬ 
ture is probably in a seventeenth-century book by 
Brathwait, “ Clitus’ Whimsies,” who alludes to the gait 
as “a Canterbury.” 
Dr. Thomas Sheridan, in a poetical letter to Swift, 
says— 
“When your Pegasus cantered in triple and rid fast.” 
Dennis, “ On the Preliminary to the Dunciad,” has: 
“The Pegasus of Pope, like a Kentish post-horse, is 
always on the Canterbury.” 
Burns, in “Tam Samson’s Elegy,” and in “Tam 
o’Shanter,” refers to the “ canter ” simply; as does also 
Combe, in “ Dr. Syntax,” xxvii. and xxxviii. 
Scott, in “Waverley,” xv., “St. Ronan’s Well,” i., 
and “Guy Mannering,” xxiii., writes of “cantering,” 
“easy canter,” and “cantered.” In “Talisman,” xxii., 
“ Old Mortality,” xliv., and “ Red Gauntlet,” Letter IV., 
he alludes to the same gait as “ a hand-gallop.” 
Byron, Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Tenny¬ 
son, Lytton, Dickens, Smedley, Dobson, Darley, Sir F. 
H. Doyle, Charles Reade, Dr. Livingstone, Saxe, and 
many other authors, in prose and poetry, discard 
the “bury,” and advert to the motion simply as a 
“ canter.” 
The notion of this gait of the horse deriving its 
name from its association with the “ Canterbury Pilgrims ” 
is untenable. Many passages in the “Tales,” and the 
illuminations in the Ellesmere manuscript, disprove the 
supposition, as we have already seen in the “ amble.” 
A PHASE OF THE SLOW CANTER. 
