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head protruding from
his raking shoulders, his
stilt-like legs stalking
under his sinewy quar-
ters; a cross between a
snake and a stag. Over-
head arch the vast empty
skies of East Anglia.
Beyond stretch the end-
less solitudes of the
heath. Vandyke's owner
might be adorned in
cutaway coat and top-hat, but his daily companion is a stable-lad-
in fustian, his slave who feeds him, waters him, exercises him.
Such a horse never went to Newmarket in a box on road and
rail. His stable-companion and slave never went to school. He
probably wandered on to Newmarket Heath, like Tom Holcroft,
after tramping the country with his parents, peddling pins and
needles, tapes and garters, or begging a living from door to door.
Soon he will be on the roads again, this time as a strolling-player.
He will scribble pieces for the theatre at Covent Garden, notably
The Road to Ruin. After his death, William Hazlitt will write his
life. No one will write the life of Vandyke, but his portrait will
hang in a hundred inns up and down England, which is nearly as
fine a form of immortality, as Hazlitt would be the first to agree.
This is life as it was lived then, by multitudes of men and beasts:
itinerant, full of chances and changes, scarcely noticed by govern-
ment-unless by a parish beadle, a preventive man or a press-
gang. . . . No one coun-
ted them until 1801, and
even then reluctantly,
for did not Holy Scrip-
ture warn against the
numbering of the
people? The census
found there were round
about thirteen million of
them in the first year of


The racheorse ' Vandyke'


A pedlar

-3-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Life in Regency England. Contributors: R. J. White - author. Publisher: B. T. Batsford. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1963. Page Number: 3.
    
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