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"stop, and give place to as many barrels of beer."* They flourished, too, in spite of the roads. "It is a most uneasy kind of passage in coaches on the paved streets of London, wherein men and women are so tost, tumbled, jumbled, rumbled, and crossing of kennels, dunghills, and uneven ways."+ It is affirmed in a pamphlet quoted by Markland, entitled " Coach and Sedan," that in 1636 the coaches" in London, the suburbs, and within four miles compass without, are reckoned to the number of six thousand and odd."

It was two years before the date of this calculation that the first hackney-coach stand was established in London. Garrard thus describes it in a letter to Strafford: "I cannot omit to mention any new thing that comes up amongst us though never so trivial: here is one Captain Baily, he hath been a sea captain, but now lives on the land, about this city, where he tries experiments. He hath erected, according to his ability, some four hackney-coaches, put his men in livery, and appointed them to stand at the May-pole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rates to carry men into several parts of the town, where all day they may be had. Other hackney-men seeing this way, they flocked to the same place, and perform their journeys at the same rate. So that sometimes there is twenty of them together, which disperse up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had by the water-side. Everybody is much pleased with it. For, whereas before coaches could not be had but at great rates, now a man may have one much cheaper." +

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"here is a procla

Writing two months after, the same retailer of news says, mation coming forth about the reformation of Hackney-coaches, and ordering of other coaches about London. One thousand nine hundred was the number of

* D'Avenant.

+ Taylor.

Strafford's Letters, vol. i. p. 227.

hackney-coaches of London, base lean jades, unworthy to be seen in so brave a city, or to stand about a king's court." In 1635 he writes, "Here is a proclamation coming forth, to prohibit all hackney-coaches to pass up and down in London streets; out of town they may go at pleasure as heretofore." It is perfectly clear that the King might proclaim, and that his subjects would not hearken to him, as long as they found hackney-coaches essential to their business or pleasure. We have an amusing example of the inefficiency of such meddling, twenty-five years after. Pepys, in his Diary of 1660, writes, " Notwithstanding this is the first day of the King's proclamation against hackney-coaches coming into the streets to stand to be hired, yet I got one to carry me home." We think we hear his cunning chuckle as he hires the coach, and laughs at the law-makers. When Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I., returned from his faithless wooing of the daughter of Philip IV., he brought with him three sedan-chairs of curious workmanship. Such a mode of conveyance was unknown to the English. They had seen the fair and the feeble carried in a box, supported by a horse before and a horse behind; and they felt, therefore, something like what we have felt at the sight of an election rabble harnessed to the wheels of a popular candidate-they felt that men were degraded, when the favourite of James and Charles, Buckingham, first moved into the streets of London, borne in his sedan on men's shoulders. Baby Charles" had presented "Steenie" with two of these luxuries of foreign growth. Wilson says, " When Buckingham came to be carried in a chair upon men's shoulders, the clamour and noise of it was so extravagant, that the people would rail on him in the streets, loathing that men should be brought to as servile a condition as horses." The very year of the expedition of Charles and Buckingham to Spain, 1623, was Massinger's "Bondman" produced. Charles and the favourite returned to London early in October; the play was first acted on the 3rd of December. It contains these lines:

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""Tis a strong-limb'd knave:
My father bought him for my sister's litter.—
O pride of women! Coaches are too common;
They surfeit in the happiness of peace,
And ladies think they keep not state enough
If, for their pomp and ease, they are not borne
In triumph on men's shoulders."

Gilchrist and Gifford think that this was an allusion to Buckingham. If so, and there can be little doubt of the matter, the vain favourite must have paraded with his new luxury, "degrading Englishmen into slaves and beasts of burden," (as a writer of that day expresses himself,) upon the instant of his return.

But the popular clamour was as ineffectual against the chairs as against the coaches. In 1634, Garrard, writing to Lord Strafford, says, "Here is also another project for carrying people up and down in close chairs, for the sole doing whereof Sir Sander Duncombe, a traveller, now a pensioner, hath obtained a patent from the king, and hath forty or fifty making ready for use." The coachmen and the chairmen soon got up a pretty quarrel; and in 1636 we find published the amusing tract, entitled "Coach and Sedan, pleasantly disputing for place and precedence." The title exhibits to us the form of the sedan, with its bearers touting for custom-and we have a description of the conveyance and its men, which, with the engraving which accompanies it, clearly enough shows that the chairmen no longer bore the "litter" on their shoulders, palanquin

fashion, but that they quickly adopted the mode of carrying which has lasted till our own day, however the form of the thing

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time of Louis XIV. the streets of Paris were so narrow, particularly in the heart of the town, that carriages could not penetrate into them.* D'Avenant's picture of London, before the fire, is not much more satisfactory: "Sure your ancestors contrived your narrow streets in the days of wheel-barrows, before those greater engines, carts, were invented. Is your climate so hot that as you walk you need umbrellas of tiles to intercept the sun? or are your shambles so empty that you are afraid to take in fresh air, lest it should sharpen your stomachs? Oh, the goodly landskip of Old Fish Street! which, had it not had the ill luck to be crooked, was narrow enough to have been your founder's perspective: and where the garrets (perhaps not for want of architecture, but through abundance of amity) are so made, that opposite neighbours may shake hands without stirring from home."

The chair had a better chance than the coach in such a state of affairs. In the pictures of coaches of the time of Elizabeth, the driver sits on a bar, or narrow chair, very low behind the horses. In those of Charles I. he sometimes drives in this way, and sometimes rides as a postillion. But the hackney-coachman after the Restoration is a personage with a short whip and spurs; he has been compelled to mount one of his horses, that he may more effectually manage his

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progress through the narrow streets. His coach, too, is a small affair. D'Avenant describes the coaches as uneasily hung, and so narrow, that I took them for sedans on wheels." As the streets were widened, after the fire, the coachman was restored to the dignity of a seat on the carriage; for, in the times of William III. and Anne, we invariably find him sitting on a box. This was a thing for use and not for finery. Here, or in a leather pouch appended to it, the careful man carried a hammer, pincers, nails, ropes, and other appliances in case of need; and the hammer-cloth was devised to conceal these necessary but unsightly remedies for broken wheels and shivered panels. The skill of this worthy artist in the way of reparation would not rust for want of use. Gay has

left us two vivid pictures of the common accidents of the days of Anne. The carman was the terror of coaches from the first hour of their use; and whether he

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* Histoire de Paris, tome ix., p. 482.

was the regular city carman, or bore the honour of the dustman, brewer's man, or coal-heaver, he was ever the same vociferous and reckless enemy of the more aristocratic coachman.

"I've seen a beau, in some ill-fated hour,

When o'er the stones chok'd kennels swell the shower,

In gilded chariot loll; he with disdain

Views spatter'd passengers all drench'd in rain.

With mud fill'd high, the rumbling cart draws near ;—
Now rule thy prancing steeds, lac'd charioteer :
The dustman lashes on with spiteful rage,
His ponderous spokes thy painted wheel engage;
Crush'd is thy pride, down falls the shrieking beau,
The slabby pavement crystal fragments strew;
Black floods of mire th' embroider'd coat disgrace,
And mud enwraps the honours of his face."

The dangers of opened vaults, and of mighty holes in the paving, fenced round with no protecting rail, and illuminated only by a glimmering rushlight in a dark street, seem to belong altogether to some barbaric region which never could have been London:

"Where a dim gleam the paly lantern throws

O'er the mid pavement, heapy rubbish grows,
Or arched vaults their gaping jaws extend,
Or the dark caves to common-shores descend;
Oft by the winds extinct the signal lies,
Or smother'd in the glimmering socket dies

Ere night has half roll'd round her ebon throne;

In the wide gulf the shatter'd coach o'erthrown

Sinks with the snorting steeds; the reins are broke,
And from the crackling axle flies the spoke."

But long after Gay's time the carmen and the pavement made havoc with coaches. If we open Hogarth, the great painter of manners shows us the vehicular dangers of his age. Bonfires in the streets on rejoicing nights, with the "Flying-coach," that went five miles an hour, overturned into the flames;* the four lawyers getting out of a hackney-coach that has come in collision with a carman, while the brewer's man rides upon his shaft in somniferous majesty ;† the dustman's bell, the little boy's drum, the knife-grinder's wheel, all in the middle of the street, to the terror of horses:‡ these representations exhibit the perils that assailed the man who ventured into a coach. The chair was no doubt safer, but it had its inconveniences. Swift describes the unhappy condition of a fop during a "City shower:"

"Box'd in a chair the beau impatient sits,

While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits;

And ever and anon with frightful din

The leather sounds;-he trembles from within!"

The chairmen were very absolute fellows. They crowded round the taverndoors, waiting for shilling customers; but they did not hesitate to set down their box when a convenient occasion offered for the recreation of a foaming mug.§ They were for the most part sturdy Milesians, revelling, if they belonged to the aristocracy, in all the finery of embroidered coats and epaulettes, and cocked hats and feathers. If they were hackney-chairmen they asserted their power of the strong arm, and were often daring enough as a body to influence the fate of + Second Stage of Cruelty. Enraged Musician.

* Night.

Hogarth's Beer Street.

Westminster and Middlesex elections, in the terror which they produced with fist and bludgeon. But they are gone. No Belinda now may be proud of

"Two pages and a chair."

They glide not amongst the chariot-wheels at levee or drawing-room. The clubs want them not. They have retired to Bath and Oxford. We believe there is one chair still lingering about May Fair; but the chairmen must be starving. The Society of Antiquaries ought to buy the relic.

Walpole has somewhere a complaint of the increase of London, that it would be soon impossible for the chairmen to perform their functions. This sounds very like the notion that the noble and the rich could ride in nothing but chairs. These were the days when the private chair had its "crimson velvet cushions and damask curtains," such as Jonathan Wild recovered for the Duchess of Marlborough, when two of his rogues, in the disguise of chairmen, carried away her chair from Lincoln's Inn Chapel, while the "true men" were drinking. The town has increased beyond Walpole's calculation, and that is, in some measure, the reason why the chairs are gone. The town did not stop in its increase to consider the chairs. But there is another reason. The rich and the high-born have wisely learned to be less exclusive than of old; and as they must now-a-days wear coats of the same fashion as humbler men, so must they ride in their own carriages, with no other perceptible difference between the carriage of the duke and his tailor than that of the blazonry. Pepys tells us of "my Lady Peterborough being in her glass-coach with the glass up, and seeing a lady pass by in a coach whom she would salute, the glass was so clear that she thought it had been open, and so ran her head through the glass."* This hints of the days when Ladies were learning to ride in glass-coaches, having just passed through the transition state of open coaches, and curtained coaches, and coaches with talc windows. How ashamed the wife of John Gilpin would have been not to have known better! And so when everybody rode in coaches the lords and ladies set up their chairs. The times are altered. We have seen a peer in an omnibus.

It is very difficult to conceive a London without an omnibus or a cabriolet. Yet who amongst us does not remember the hour when they first appeared? For some two hundred years, those who rode in hired carriages had seen the hackney-coach passing through all its phases of dirt and discomfort; the springs growing weaker, the "iron ladder" by which we ascended into its rickety capaciousness more steep and more fragile, the straw filthier, the cushions more redolent of dismal smells, the glasses less air-tight. But it is of little consequence. Nobody rides in them. The gentlemen at the "office for granting licences for carriages plying for hire in the metropolis" tell us that licences are still granted to four hundred hackney-coaches. Alas, how are the horses fed? Are the drivers living men who eat beef and drink beer? We doubt if those huge capes ever descend to receive a fare. Are they not spectre-coaches—coachmen still doomed to sleep upon their boxes, as the wild huntsman was doomed to a demon chase-for propitiation? The same authority tells us that there are fifteen hundred cabriolets to whom licences are granted. These we know are things of life. They rush about the streets as rapid as fire-flies. They lame few, they kill fewer. They sometimes overturn us :--but their serious damage is not much. We borrowed them from the French on a fine May morning in the year

* Diary, 1667.

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