best customers to an inn, and the most liberal to
servants; there was one description of persons, however, frequenting the
inn, which I did not like at all, and which I did not get on well with,
and these people were the stage-coachmen.

The stage-coachmen of England, at the time of which I am speaking,
considered themselves mighty fine gentry, nay, I verily believe the most
important personages of the realm, and their entertaining this high
opinion of themselves can scarcely be wondered at; they were low fellows,
but masters at driving; driving was in fashion, and sprigs of nobility
used to dress as coachmen and imitate the slang and behaviour of the
coachmen, from whom occasionally they would take lessons in driving as
they sat beside them on the box, which post of honour any sprig of
nobility who happened to take a place on a coach claimed as his
unquestionable right; and these sprigs would smoke cigars and drink
sherry with the coachmen in bar-rooms, and on the road; and, when bidding
them farewell, would give them a guinea or a half-guinea, and shake them
by the hand, so that these fellows, being low fellows, very naturally
thought no small liquor of themselves, but would talk familiarly of their
friends lords so and so, the honourable misters so and so, and Sir Harry
and Sir Charles, and be wonderfully saucy to any one who was not a lord,
or something of the kind; and this high opinion of themselves received
daily augmentation from the servile homage paid them by the generality of
the untitled male passengers, especially those on the fore part of the
coach, who used to contend for the honour of sitting on the box with the
coachman when no sprig was nigh to put in his claim. Oh! what servile
homage these craven creatures did pay these same coach fellows, more
especially after witnessing this or t'other act of brutality practised
upon the weak and unoffending--upon some poor friendless woman travelling
with but little money, and perhaps a brace of hungry children with her,
or upon some thin and half-starved man travelling on the hind part of the
coach from London to Liverpool with only eighteen pence in his pocket
after his fare was paid, to defray his expenses on the road; for as the
insolence of these knights was vast, so was their rapacity enormous; they
had been so long accustomed to have crowns and half-crowns rained upon
them by their admirers and flatterers, that they would look at a
shilling, for which many