practical purpose,
farther from Reading than they now are from Edinburgh, and farther from
Edinburgh than they now are from Vienna.

The subjects of Charles the Second were not, it is true, quite
unacquainted with that principle which has, in our own time, produced an
unprecedented revolution in human affairs, which has enabled navies to
advance in face of wind and tide, and brigades of troops, attended by
all their baggage and artillery, to traverse kingdoms at a pace equal to
that of the fleetest race horse. The Marquess of Worcester had recently
observed the expansive power of moisture rarefied by heat. After many
experiments he had succeeded in constructing a rude steam engine, which
he called a fire water work, and which he pronounced to be an admirable
and most forcible instrument of propulsion. [131] But the Marquess was
suspected to be a madman, and known to be a Papist. His inventions,
therefore found no favourable reception. His fire water work might,
perhaps, furnish matter for conversation at a meeting of the Royal
Society, but was not applied to any practical purpose. There were no
railways, except a few made of timber, on which coals were carried from
the mouths of the Northumbrian pits to the banks of the Tyne. [132]
There was very little internal communication by water. A few attempts
had been made to deepen and embank the natural streams, but with slender
success. Hardly a single navigable canal had been even projected. The
English of that day were in the habit of talking with mingled admiration
and despair of the immense trench by which Lewis the Fourteenth had
made a junction between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They little
thought that their country would, in the course of a few generations,
be intersected, at the cost of private adventurers, by artificial rivers
making up more than four times the length of the Thames, the Severn, and
the Trent together.

It was by the highways that both travellers and goods generally passed
from place to place; and those highways appear to have been far worse
than might have been expected from the degree of wealth and civilisation
which the nation had even then attained. On the best lines of
communication the ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the way
often such as it was hardly possible to distinguish, in the dusk, from
the unenclosed heath and fen which lay on both sides. Ralph Thorseby,
the antiquary, was in danger of losing his way on the grea