at home that pays no excise at all. Then
more clothing, capes, coats, safe-guards and
boots are required for horseback, which makes
good for trade, whereas these mischievous
coaches actually save people's clothes."
Truly dreadful!

What will the reader think of the following
outfit for a traveller by stage-coach
in the reign of Charles the Second?
"Now in coaches gentlemen wear a silk suit,
an Indian gown with a sash, silk stockings,
and beaver hats, and carry no
other with them, because they escape the wet
and dirt." Why gentlemen even used coaches
to go to and from their country houses, and to
pay visits: an unpardonable crime in the eyes
of John Cresset. Then this pleasant means of
escape from the wet and dirt causes country
gentlemen to make journeys to London, and
country ladies too, and then they must buy
fine clothes there, and then they get into
a perverse way of wanting everything from
London, whatever it costs. Nor is the
consumption of food at the inns so great, since
these coaches were set up. "A coach with
four horses carries six passengers; a caravan
with four or five carries twenty or five-and-
twenty;  but when they come to an
inn, they club together for a dish or two of
meat, and spend not above twelvepence or
sixteenpence a-piece, though they sleep there.
Take the grand roads of England, York,
Exeter, Chester; there are about five hundred
inns on each road, and these coaches do not
call at fifteen or sixteen; so the landlords
must be ruined." This immense number of
inns must have included every little wayside
public-house, but strongly corroborates the
remark of contemporary writers, as to the
great consumption of beer and ale, as well
as to the great traffic along the principal
roads at this time. According to Cresset,
there must have averaged nearly three inns
to every mile.

London herself is a loser by this
tremendous innovation. It is not very
clearly made out; but Mr. Cresset was
credibly assured that some most worthy tradesmen
have very much fallen in the world.
Is is not impossible, however, that the plague
year, and the fire of London, the extravagance
of the court, and the wretched
misgovernment of the country, might have
accounted for some trifling part of the
commercial pressure of that day. Mr. Cresset's
illustration supplies a curious trait
of the old London tradesman's
housekeeping.  "There are several handicraft
tradesmen therein who kept twenty or thirty
journeymen at work, and spent a quarter of
beef, and a carcase of mutton a week in their
houses, who since these running stages and
caravans have set up, have fallen to a couple
of apprentices." He tells us that lodgings in
London let at five and six shillings a week,
and that persons who took them during their
stay in London had their meals fetched from
the cook's shop, at double the price of the
inns. He also mentions that in the longer
stages they changed coachmen four times
and few passengers give less than twelvepence
to each coachman. The fares from London to
Exeter, York, or Chester, were fifty shillings
in the summer, and forty-five shillings in the
winter (in the old lumbering coaches the
price was forty shillings); there was also the
passenger's share for the coachman's drink
on the road, which he calculates at about one
shilling and sixpence additional each journey.
Now, when all these expenses are
added together, judge, says he, whether men
may not hire horses all along the road cheaper?

John Cresset gathers himself up towards
the end for a powerful peroration: "Thirdly,
these coaches can neither prove advantageous
to health, or business; for what advantage can
it be to a man's health to be called out of
their beds into these coaches an hour before
day, to be hurried in them from place to
place, till one hour, or two, or three within
night, insomuch that after sitting all day in
the summer time, stifled with heat and choked
with dust, or in winter time starving and
freezing with cold, or choked with filthy fogs,
they are often brought to their inns by torchlight,
when it is too late to sit up to get a
supper, and next morning forced into the
coach so early that they can get no breakfast.
Is it for a man's health to ride
all day with strangers, oftentimes sick,
ancient, or diseased persons, or young children
crying? Is it for a man's health to travel
with tired jades, to be laid fast in foul ways,
and forced to wade up to the knees in mire? and
sit in the cold till teams of horses can be sent
to pull the coach out? or the tackle, pearch,
or axletree broken, or the rudeness of a surly,
dogged, cursing, ill-natured coachman! No;
let men and women travel on horseback
again."

Travelling on horseback, however, was not
altogether a primrose path in those days,
as the following chapter of accidents set
down by worthy Henry Newcome in his
characteristic diary will show: "The weather
being good this day, we set out about nine.
By that time we had rid a little above two
miles, my cousin Hannah fell in a dry ditch,
and pulled her horse upon her, and cut her
head very sadly. I was much affected at it,
and would have been content to have turned
again. But we turned into a little town
called Newton, to Mr. Tret's, the minister's
house, and got the wound dressed and balsam
put into it, and the wound bound up, and she
was very hearty, and concluded after two
hours stay to go forward. We came next to
St. Neot's, which was but ten miles, but Mrs.
Katherine Robinson, one of our company,
was tired, and ready to fall off her horse;
then I was forced to take her [that is, on
the pillion behind him] and Rose, his
daughter, rode single nine miles; but then it
rained, and was so cold on that plain