The Project Gutenberg eBook, Old Roads and New Roads, by William Bodham
Donne

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Title: Old Roads and New Roads

Author: William Bodham Donne

Release Date: December 31, 2009 [eBook #30819]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD ROADS AND NEW ROADS***

Transcribed from the 1852 Chapman and Hall edition by David Price,
ccx074@pglaf.org

OLD ROADS
AND
NEW ROADS.

* * * * *

* * * * *

"MESSER LUDOVICO, DOVE AVETE COGLIATO TANTE COGLIONERIE?"

* * * * *

* * * * *

LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.

* * * * *

1852.

PRINTED BY
JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, LITTLE QUEEN STREET,
LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS.

PREFACE.

GENTLE READER,

If you look to move through this little volume in a direct line, after
the present fashion of Railway Travelling, you will be signally
disappointed. Nothing can well be more circuitous than the route
proposed to you, nor more eccentric than your present guide. This book
aspires to the precision of neither Patterson nor Bradshaw. Let men
"bloody with spurring, fiery hot with speed," consult those oracles of
swiftness and rectitude of way: we do not belong to their manor. We
desire to beguile, by a sort of serpentine irregularity, the occasional
tedium of rapid movement. We move to our journey's end by sundry
old-fashioned circuitous routes. Grudge not, while you are whirled along
a New Road, to loiter mentally upon certain Old Roads, and to consider as
you linger along them the ways and means of transit which contented our
ancestors. Although their coaches were slow, and their pack-saddles hard
as those of the Yanguesan carriers of La Mancha, yet they reached their
inns in time, and bequeathed t