for exercise, or to improve body or soul, which is a reason that has lately been condemned by Mr. Belloc. “The detestable habit of walking for exercise,” he tells us, “warps the soul.”[8] He is perhaps assuming that the man always keeps this one object in view, and is always looking at his watch or feeling his pulse. But even a man walking for exercise may forget his object and unexpectedly profit; he may surprise happiness by the wayside or beyond the third stile, and no man can do more, whether he have the best and the most Bellocian object in the world. Then he condemns also men who ride along the road and into an inn yard and feel that they are “like some one in a book.” This is a rather serious matter. Authors have unintentionally persuaded simple men to suffer many blisters for the chance of drinking ale in the manner of Borrow and meeting adventures, in the hope of being heartily and Whitmanesquely democratic. Even Leslie Stephen half-seriously lamented that he was unworthy of Borrovian adventures; for they never fell to him. A writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ has made a good piece of prose in which he speaks of himself reading the _Essays of Elia_ in an old inn at Llandovery--as Hazlitt read _La Nouvelle Heloise_ at Llangollen on his birthday. A great many must be walking over England nowadays for the primary object of writing books: it has not been decided whether this is a worthy object. Mr. John Burroughs also condemns a walk taken as a prescription, but goes so far as to regard walking itself as a virtue. He says that his countrymen “have fallen from that state of grace which capacity to enjoy a walk implies”; that they pride themselves on small feet, though “a little foot never yet supported a great character.” He says they could “walk away from all their ennui, their worldly cares, their uncharitableness, their pride of dress; for these devils always want to ride, while the simple virtues are never so happy as on foot.” He concludes by singing “the sweetness of gravel and good sharp quartz-grit.” He must be singing the grit of yester-year, or he never walked all day in the full blaze of summer upon the grit between Newmarket and Hitchin. Leslie Stephen thought the true walker one to whom walking “is in itself delightful”; he regarded walking as a panacea for authors, and believed that it could have cured Johnson and made Byron like Scott. A year or two ago Mr. Harold Munro took a month across France into Italy, for a part of the time putting himself out of reach of letters--to prove to himself that he could do it. There are plenty of adventures in modern life, but we still crave for the conspicuous ones which look so splendid when their heroes are distant or in the grave. These are the only adventures which we deign to recognize as such, and walking being a primitive act “natural to man,” as Mr. Belloc says, we feel restored to a pristine majesty, or Arcadianism at least, when we undertake it.