From "The Birth of The Modern" by Paul Johnson: "So people walked, women as well as men. When Keats went on his tour of Scotland in 1818, he went by public coa

From "The Birth of The Modern" by Paul Johnson: "So people walked, women as well as men. When Keats went on his tour of Scotland in 1818, he went by public coach as far as Lancashire and on foot thereafter. Worsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge began a similar Scottish tour together on foot, Coleridge branching off by himself at Stirling and continuing for nearly 300 miles until there was nothing left of his shoes. Dorothy Wordsworth, with a friend or relative, regularly walked from Penrith across the Pennines and moors to visit the Hutchinsons near Halifax. Hazlitt would walk from London to his writing base at Winterslow in Wiltshire. His first wife Sarah, while waiting for her Scottish divorce in Edinburgh, walked a total of over 200 miles to vist places of interest. Painters were great walkers, too, like the 'Ancients',who walked from London to see their friend Samuel Palmer on the Kentish coast at Shoreham, or Michael Angelo Rooker, who spent his summers 'pedestrian excursions, 18 miles a day.' So were musicians: The young Richard Wagner, despite his short legs, walked from Dresden to Leipzig and back. Saving money was one motive, seeing nature another, exercise a third. When the painter John Hoppner stayed with the nautical Duke of Clarence at Petersham, he was taken off every day after dinner for 'a walk of 10 or 12 miles." No mention of the weather. I have more than once on reflecting on this passage wondered at the quality of their shoes. [edited some egregious typos]