ANIMALS IN MOTION. 
166 
Caesar (Clarke), in his commentaries, “ Wars in Gaul,” 
writes that “ Considius came galloping back;” and in the 
“Civil War” that “ Pompey . . . rode full speed to 
Larissa.” 
Phaer, in the sixteenth century, causes Virgil, in 
“ ./Eneidos,” to say— 
“ In armour iointly ryde, hie shoutes vprise and clustring strakes 
They gallop, and vnder their trampling feete the ground with breaking 
quakes.” 
Dryden renders the passage— 
“The neighing coursers answer to the sound 
And shake with horny hoofs the solid ground.” 
Pliny (Holland), describing a lion hunt, says, “ Then he 
[the lion] skuds away, then he runneth amaine for his 
life.” 
Lucan (Rowe),— 
“ The fliers now a doubtful flight maintain 
While the fleet horse in squadrons scour the plain.” 
Plutarch (North) : “ Hannibal . . . commanded the 
horsemen ... to scurry to the trenches.” 
Tacitus (Murphy) speaks of “a Numidian horseman, 
posting at full speed.” 
The translators of these books used, of course, the 
phraseology that occurred to them as best indicating the, 
perhaps indefinite, motion expressed by the authors. 
Coming to a more recent period, it is interesting to 
note the different words and expressions used by English 
authors during the last few centuries to denote extreme 
speed. 
In a thirteenth-century manuscript, “ Amis and Ami- 
loun,” of the Auchinlech Collections— 
“On palfray, and on stede 
He pryked both nyght and day 
Till he come to his contray, 
There he was lord in dede.” 
Pricking was by early English writers used as synony¬ 
mous with rapid speed. 
Chaucer constantly makes use of the term. In “The 
Tale of Sir Thopas,” Fyt I.— 
“ . . . priked as he were wood ; 
His faire steede in his prikynge 
So swette, that men might him wrynge 
His sydes were al blood.” 
In the fourteenth century “ walop ” was occasionally 
used. In the reproduction of the manuscripts of “Morte 
Arthure,” by the Early English Text Society, occurs— 
“ Swerdes swangene in two sweltand knyghtez 
Lyes wyde opyne welterande one walopande stedez ; ” 
and by the same society, in the “Romance of William of 
Palerne,” of date 1350— 
“ Or he wiste, he was war of the white beres 
Thei went a-wai a wallop as thei wod [mad] semed.” 
In “Merlin,” an anonymous manuscript of 1450, 
appears— 
“Than the Kynge rode formest hym-self a grete walop.” 
