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kingdom, says, "Before these coaches were set up, travellers rode on horseback; and men had boots, spurs, saddles, bridles, saddle-cloths, and good riding suits. .... Most gentlemen, before they travelled in their coaches, used to ride with swords, belts, pistols, holsters, portmanteaus, and hat-cases; for when they rode on horseback they rode in one suit, and carried another to wear when they came to their journey's end, or lay by the way. . . . . And if they were women that travelled, they needed to have safeguards and hoods, sidesaddles, and pillions, with strappings, saddle or pillion cloths, which, for the most part, were either laced or embroidered." The saving of much of this expenditure, by travelling in coaches, the writer holds, is the ruin of trade. "For, formerly, every man that had occasion to travel many journeys yearly, or to ride up and down, kept horses for himself and his servants, and seldom rid without one or two men." In 1526, the Earl of Cumberland rode from Skipton to London, with thirty-three servants. (Whitaker's Craven.) In 1582, the Earl of Shrewsbury writes to a dependant: "I think my company will be twenty gentlemen and twenty yeomen, besides their men and my horsekeepers. I think to set forwards about the 11th of September, from Wingfield to Leicester, to my bed, and to make but four days' journey to London." (Lodge's Illustrations.) In 1640, the wife of the last Earl of Cumberland rode from London to Londesborough, having thirty-two horses in her train; and the journey occupied eleven days. These slow progresses were the relics of the old times of sumpter-horses, when princes and nobles travelled with vast cavalcades, like an oriental caravan. We must not imagine that all equestrian travelling was at this slow rate. James I. of England was indeed nearly five weeks on his padded saddle, in his royal progress from Edinburgh to London; but Sir Robert Carey, determining to be the first to tell James that he was king of England, stole out of Richmond Palace, at three o'clock of the morning of Thursday, the 24th of March, and reached Edinburgh on the night of Saturday, the 26th, the king having gone to bed by the time he had knocked at the gate. This ride of four hundred miles in seventy hours, gives one an elevated notion of the travelling accommodations of two centuries and a half ago. But it must be borne in mind that such instances were the exceptions to the rule of slow travelling. Although the Post was not established by law, there were post-masters, at the end of the sixteenth century, on all the great lines of roads; and, for a sufficient consideration, they would furnish such a traveller as Sir Robert Carey with abundant horses, that he might ride till they dropped,―as, indeed, he records one of his horses to have done. Then, again, although the roads were bad, the equestrian had many a mile of the smooth turf of an unenclosed country to gallop over. Let it not be forgotten, that if Sir Robert Carey rode from London to Edinburgh at the rate of six miles an hour, keeping on night and day, with relays of horses, the general communication of the country was so slow, that although Elizabeth died at

two o'clock of the morning of Thursday, the 24th of March, and James was proclaimed king, at London, on the same morning, "yet the news of it reached not the city of York, until Sunday, March the 27th.' (Continuation of Stow's Annals.)

The days before the Post were days when those who left their houses, for distant parts of England, were more separated from their friends than the North American emigrant of our own times. The transmission of intelligence across the Atlantic is now an easier thing than the old conveyance of a letter two hundred miles, upon a cross road. The historian of Craven, speaking of 1609, says, "at this time the communication between the north of England and the universities was kept up by carriers, who pursued their tedious but uniform route with whole trains of packhorses. To their care were consigned not only the packages, but frequently the persons, of young scholars. It was through their medium, also, that epistolary correspondence was managed; and as they always visited London, a letter could scarcely be exchanged between Yorkshire and Oxford in less time than a month." Charles I. seems, in 1635, to have resolved to remedy this evil, by the establishment of the home post-office. In his proclamation of that year he says, that there had been no certain intercourse between England and Scotland; and he therefore commands a running post to be established between London and Edinburgh, to go thither and come back again in six days; and for other roads there are promised the same advantages. In 1660 the General Post-office was established by act of parliament; and all letters were to be sent through this office, "except such letters as shall be sent by coaches, common known carriers of goods by carts, waggons, and pack-horses, and shall be carried along with their carts, waggons, and packhorses respectively." The Post-master General and his deputies, under this statute, and no other person or persons, "shall provide and prepare horses and furniture to let to hire unto all thorough posts and persons riding in post, by commission or without, to and from all and every the places of England, Scotland, and Ireland, where any post-roads are." We find, by various clauses of this act, that the Post-master was also to furnish a guide with a horn to such as ride post, that he was to furnish horses within half an hour after demand, and that if he could not accomplish this, persons might hire a horse where they could, and sue the Post-master for a penalty. The country Postmaster was an ancient functionary, who had long been in the habit of attending to the wants of those who bore letters inscribed " Haste, haste, post haste." He was generally an inn-keeper. Taylor, the water poet, in his "Penniless Pilgrimage" from London to Scotland, in 1618, has described one that might rival any Boniface on record: "From Stamford, the next day, we rode to Huntingdon, where we lodged at the postmaster's house, at the sign of the Crown; his name is Riggs. He was informed who I was, and wherefore I undertook this my penniless progress; wherefore he

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The CARRIERS of England have always been a progressive body, in more than one sense of the word. They were amongst the first in our days to see what railways would accomplish for the transit of goods and passengers. They were the first, more than two centuries ago, to change the mode of passenger-conveyance from the riding-horse to the waggon. They brought the Oxford scholars, as we have seen, out of the North with their pack-horses. The most famous of all the old carriers was he of Cambridge, of whom Milton wrote,

"Here lies old Hobson; Death hath broke his girt,

And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt."

He it was that gave rise to the saying of "Hobson's choice;" for he obliged his customers for hackney

came up to our chamber, and supped with us, and very | while he is on the king's highway, and the bells go bountifully called for three quarts of wine and sugar, cheerily as he crosses some pleasant common. Perand four jugs of beer. He did drink and begin healths chance, as he ascends the wide moorlands, the clouds like a horse-leech, and swallowed down his cups without darken around him, the mist falls heavily, the carriers feeling, as if he had had the dropsy, or nine pound can see no track; but by an unerring instinct the of spunge in his maw. In a word, as he is a post, he cautiously stepping horses keep their file, and ask no drank post, striving and calling by all means to make better guide than the sound of their sagacious leader's the reckoning great, or to make us men of great reckon- bells. He will not lead them into boggy places; he ing. But in his payment he was tired like a jade, leaving will keep steady, even when man has ceased to direct the gentleman that was with me to discharge the terrible him. If the way is unusually rough, the old and feeble shot, or else one of my horses must have lain in pawn horses lag behind; but they never break the order of for his superfluous calling and unmannerly intrusion." their march, and they ultimately push on, even if they should die in their perseverance.* The inexperienced passenger must have needed some courage in these passages across the semi-deserts of uncultivated England. But soon he is in a lane some four feet wide,— sometimes floundering in the mud-at other times slipping upon a paved causeway, with a thick sludge on either side of the narrow track. In the hills of Derbyshire have we ridden the sure-footed pony of the country down these winding roads, shut out from the wide prospect around us by overhanging hedges-a privation which the pack-horse traveller little cared for. But not only in Derbyshire, in the days before men sought the picturesque, were such roads travelled over, but in the very thickest of our metropolitan suburb. Hagbush Lane, which was described by William Hone only thirty years ago, but which has now vanished, was the ancient bridle or pack-horse road from London to the North, and extended by the Holloway back road, as far as the City-road, near Old Street. "Some parts of Hagbush-lane," says Hone," are much lower than the meadows on either side." At one time a terraced ridge, at another a deep rut, the pack-horse road must have been to the unaccustomed traveller a somewhat perilous pass. Happy would he be when the house which promised "good entertainment for man and horse," and which, in the early days of English art, hung out a representation of the animal he bestrode, which might be mistaken for a dromedary, - happy would he be when the "watering-time" arrived. Well-earned would be the Again would the cavalcade be in movement, "till dewy eve,"-again would come the rasher and eggs for supper, with the black jack of home-brewed ale; again the sound sleep, in spite of night plagues; and again the early morning journey. A fortnight between York and London would be a quick passage. Well, there might be worse arrangements for a contemplative traveller; but for ourselves, being somewhat fearless of innovations, we must avow a preference for the Express-train.

the

He was

horses to take the one that stood next the stable-door.
His trade of horse-letting was a refinement upon
old trade of the postmaster: he intrusted a horse to
the Cambridge scholar for a pleasure ride, and he sent
no guide to feed the horse and bring it back.
a pack-horse carrier. It was not till after his palmy
days that the innovation of waggons came in, in which
passengers were carried from city to city. But long
did the passenger-waggon and the pack-horse continue
to travel in good fellowship. Roderick Random tried
both conveyances:
a waggon in this country (Scotland), and my finances
were too weak to support the expense of hiring a horse.
I determined therefore to set out with the carriers, who
transport goods from one place to another on horse-
back; and this scheme I accordingly put in execution
on the 1st day of November, 1739, sitting upon a pack-rest.

"There is no such convenience as

saddle between two baskets, one of which contained my goods in a knapsack. But by the time we arrived at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I was so fatigued with the tediousness of the carriage, and benumbed with the coldness of the weather, that I resolved to travel the rest of my journey on foot, rather than proceed in such a disagreeable manner." We of this age complain that the penny-a-mile passengers in covered railway carriages, which only go ten miles an hour, are somewhat hardly used. Let us contrast this case with that of the pack-horse traveller. Seated in the throne which Roderick Random occupied, he sallied forth at "four by the day," when the horses were "packed;" forgetting, for a little while, the uneasiness of his seat, by the remembrance how he had been "stung like a tench." He is stuck in the midst of a file of fifty horses, a large companionship for safety. For a little

Our antiquarian annalist, Stow, records that, in 1605, LONG WAGGONS for passengers and commodities travelled to London from Canterbury and other large towns. According to this authority, they were known as early as 1564. "The lover of his country," whom we have already quoted, has no violent objection to

pack-horse, thus exerting himself to maintain his place, dropping down dead

See, in Bewick's "History of Quadrupeds," an interesting anecdote of a when he reached the inn-yard.

these "long waggon coaches," as he calls them. They plead some antiquity; "they were first set up.' Moreover they are not guilty of the sin of expedition. Compared with the objects of his hatred, the stage coaches, they are innocent things: "they travel not such long journeys, go not out so early in the morning, neither come in so late at night; but stay by the way, travel easily, without jolting men's bodies, or hurrying them along, as the running coaches do." These convenient creeping things had a safe existence for a century or two; and bore up bravely against the sneers of the "flying-coaches" that went four miles an hour. Roderick Random, as we have said, tried both the pack-horse and the waggon. This waggon was "the long waggon" of Stow; the "long waggon coach" of "the lover of his country." Not much more than a hundred years ago there was a vehicle moving on the Great North Road, in which passengers, who assumed to be gentlefolks, were travelling from York to London at the fare of a shilling a-day,-not being more than a fortnight in the transit. The description which Smollett gives of his ride to London is known to have been derived from his own experience. He and his faithful friend, Strap, having observed the waggon a quarter of a mile before them, speedily over

took it; and ascending the convenience by a ladder, tumbled into the straw, under the darkness of the tilt, amidst four passengers, two gentlemen and two very genteel specimens of the fair sex. When they arrived at the inn where they were to lodge for the night, Captain Weazel and his lady desired a room for themselves, and a separate supper; but the impartial innkeeper replied that "he had prepared victuals for the passengers in the waggon, without respect of persons." Roderick agrees to give ten shillings for his passage to London, provided Strap, who was to trudge by the side, should change places with him when he was disposed to walk. The mistakes, the quarrels, and the mirth of the passengers, are told by the novelist with a vivacity which would be admirable without its coarseness. They got tolerably reconciled to each other after the first five days' rumbling in the straw. "Nothing remarkable happened during the remaining part of our journey, which continued six or seven days longer. At length we entered the great city, and lodged all night at the inn where the waggon put up."

Let not the "long stage waggon," which thus kept alive a monthly communication between Yorkshire and London, and carried, according to Smollett, no less dignified persons than a medical student, an ensign in

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