[cf. CANTER v.2] A Canterbury gallop; an easy gallop. ‘The exertion is much less, the spring less distant, and the feet come to the ground in more regular succession,’ than in the gallop proper (Youatt).
1755. Connoisseur, No. 69. She never ventured beyond a canter or a hand-gallop.
1773. Johnson, s.v. Canterbury gallop, The hand gallop of an ambling horse, commonly called a canter.
1831. Youatt, Horse (1843), 527. The canter is to the gallop very much what the walk is to the trot.
1851. Longf., Gold. Leg., v. This canter over hill and glade.
b. To win in a canter: to distance all the other horses in a race so much that galloping is unnecessary at the end; fig. to come off victor with the greatest ease.
1853. Lytton, My Novel (Hoppe). He wins the game in a canter.
1874. Sat. Rev., Aug., 180 (ibid.). Hermitage won in a common canter.
2. fig. (cf. run, scamper.)
1853. Sir J. Stephen, Right Use of Books, in Lit. Addr. (1855), 5 (Webster). A canter in the Times over all the topics of the day.
1865. Dickens, Mut. Fr., xi. 86. Ma was talking then, at her usual canter.
1879. O. W. Holmes, Motley, xvii. 118. He ever and anon relieves his prose jog trot by breaking into a canter of poetry.
