a pair of horses, a coachman and a footman; it
must have been the work of an inventor seeking
the smallest result at the largest expense, as
it had no apparent advantage over a chariot, and
was less useful.

The chariot still retains its place among those
who always have at least one footman to spare
—among a decreasing number of dowagers and
a few physicians; but such is the effect of
change of fashion, that a second-hand one is
almost unsaleable; twenty pounds will buy what
cost two hundred and fifty pounds; whereas fifty
years ago no carriage was in such demand as the
chariot; and in its lowest stages it was to be
found on hack-stands and at livery stables, in the
place of the modern fly.

The mail phaeton of the last generation of the
pre-railroad age has been reduced in size and
weight, and (in the majority of instances), by the
abolition of the perch, transformed into the
Stanhope phaeton. It is likely to continue
popular with the large number who enjoy driving,
and can afford to drive, a pair of horses. The old
mail phaeton, some specimens of which may still
be seen driven by country bankers and masters
of hounds, required a pair of full-sized expensive
horses to draw it well, instead of the small blood
horses which best suit a Stanhope phaeton; but
it was, of its kind, a luxurious carriage, by its
strength and weight defying the jolts of the worst
roads, and overpowering the impudence of the
drunken drivers of market-carts. Nothing less
than collision with a four-wheeled waggon could
shake it, while the driver, high above his horses,
held them in complete command, and rolled
serenely along, overlooking garden walls, and
looking down on all ordinary vehicles. In the
days when roadside inns regularly expected and
received a succession of guests, there was
nothing pleasanter than a tour of visits to
hospitable friends, in a well-appointed mail phaeton,
with an agreeable companion at your side, and
a clever handy groom behind. The big hood was
a partial protection to the great-coated many-
caped inmates, and the blazing lamps and rattling
pole chains made even a dark and foggy night
not altogether disagreeable, from the comforting
sensation that if anything you could not see did
run against you, it was not your solid carriage
that would get the worst of it.

The fashionable two-wheeled half-covered town
carriage of Reform Bill days was the cabriolet.
Palace-yard was full of them on the evenings of
great debates. Now, you may count on your
fingers the number that are worth looking at in
the Park, or at the doors of the best clubs. The
Brougham killed the cabriolet, superseding it
entirely as the one carriage of the bachelor, and
leaving it only for a few, to whom a carriage, more
or less, is of no consequence. In another twenty
years the cabriolet will have followed its predecessor,
the curricle, to the limbo of marine stores.
The cabriolet, when perfectly appointed, was a
very stately bachelor's day carriage, costing a
large sum of money to build, requiring a very
expensive horse, with a change if used at night
as well as day, unfit for country expeditions, and
not complete without a perfectly useless boy
jolting unmercifully behind, and too mall for
anything but ornament.

The age of Tom and Jerry bucks drove fast
trotters in gigs, or dashed along in tandems—
tandems which are nearly abandoned by under-
graduates, and almost confined to headstrong
shop-keepers on Sundays, and the long journeys
of young Norfolk farmers on market-days.

The Brougham, invented in 1839, gave a
fatal blow to the cabriolet, by affording the maximum
of appearance and convenience at the cost
of one horse and one servant.

It is rather surprising that the noble lord who
gave the idea and his name to this invaluable
improvement in town carriages, has never made it
the subject of a paragraph in one of those
wonderful discourses on everything in general and
nothing in particular, addressed to social science
meetings. For the social results of the Brougham
have been immense, harmonising families, bringing
husband and wife together, accommodating
children, making beauties look more beautiful,
cutting off the necessity of a footman, and, not
least, reforming street conveyances, which
travelled through a fearful interregnum of danger
and discomfort, between the decline of the hackney
coach of our childhood and the rise of the four-
wheeler of our first whiskers. The secret
history of the origin, rise, and triumph, of the
Brougham has never been written, and perhaps
never will be, yet it is worth the attention of
those industrious biographers who devote their
whole energies to the researches into the private
lives of jockeys, blacklegs, and boxers, record their
tastes in meats and puddings, their triumphs,
their recondite jokes, and exhaust classical
quotations from Mr. Maunder's manuals on their
adventurous lives and premature deaths.

The germ of the Brougham is to be found in
certain street vehicles drawn by one horse in use
in Birmingham and Liverpool forty years ago,
under the name of one-horse cars. So recently
as 1837 a gentleman's covered carriage on four
wheels drawn by one horse, was entirely unknown
to the genteel, not to say the fashionable, world;
for in that year the most complete and scientific
book on pleasure carriages was published by Mr.
Adams, then a coachbuilder, since a distinguished
mechanical engineer, and he gives no hint of the
coming carriage reform.

Mr. Adams made an early display of his
ingenuity by building a carriage now only
remembered in connexion with the great Duke of
Wellington, who drove one to the last, the
Equirotal, which, in theory, combined the advantage
of a two-wheeled and a four-wheeled carriage, the
forepart and wheels being connected with the
hind body by a hinge or joint, so that no matter
how the horses turned, the driver always had
them square before him; a great advantage. It
was also, at the cost of something under five hundred
pounds, convertible into a series of vehicles.