when, with his ' bonnet vail'd,' according to the 'courtesies' of his time,

6

he has to recover his auburn locks' from the ditch' that crosses the thoroughfare.

6

The days we are noticing were not those of pedestrians. The red-heel'd shoes' of the time of Anne were as little suited for walking as the ' pantofles' of Elizabeth, whereof some be of white leather, some of black, and some of red; some of black velvet, some of white, some of red, some of green, rayed, carved, cut, and stitched all over with silk, and laid on with gold, silver, and such like.' So Stubbes describes the corked shoes' of his day; and he adds, what seems very apparent, to go abroad in them as they are now used altogether, is rather a let or hindrance to a man than otherwise.** These fine shoes belonged to the transition state between the horse and the coach; when men were becoming 'effeminate' in the use of the new vehicles, which we have seen the Water-Poet denounced; and the highways of London were not quite suited to the walker. Shoes such as those are ridiculed by Stubbes as uneasy to go in;' and he adds, 'they exaggerate a mountain of mire, and gather a heap of clay and baggage together.'

When the coach and the chair were fairly launched into the streets of London, they held joint possession for more than a century and a half. We have no doubt that the chair was a most flourishing invention. The state of the pavement till the middle of the last century must have rendered carriage conveyance anything rather than safe and pleasant. Dulaure tells us that before the 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: 6 Sure your ancestors contrived your narrow streets in the days of Histoire de Paris, tome ix., p. 482.

* Anatomy of Abuses.

wheelbarrows, 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 postilion. 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 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 vas 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 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 filled 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 in 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 tavern-doors, 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 Westminster and Middlesex elections, in the terror which they produced with fist and bludgeon. They, and the whole race of bullying and fighting ministers of transit, belonged to what Fielding termed The Fourth Estate.' That dignity is now assigned to the Press. Civilization has been too strong for Barbarism.

An ingenious Frenchman thus describes the populace of England: The people of the inferior classes are distinguished by a brutishness of which one can scarcely form an † Second Stage of Cruelty. Enraged Musician. § Hogarth's Beer Street.

* Night.