the Great a cobbler of shoes; and "imperial Caesar
dead and turned to clay" a hawker of petty wares. It was easier to fit
the shadows of monarchs with employment than it would be to find business
for departed coachmen. "A coachman, Sir," said one of these worthies to
ourselves, who was sorrowfully contemplating the approaching day of his
extinction by a nearly completed railway,--"a coachman, if he really be
one, is fit for nothing else. The hand which has from boyhood--or rather
horsekeeper-hood--grasped the reins, cannot close upon the chisel or the
shuttle. He cannot sink into a book-keeper, for his fingers could as
soon handle a lancet as a pen. His bread is gone when his stable-door is
shut." We attempted to console him by pointing out that it was a law of
nature for certain races of mankind to become extinct. Were not the Red
Men fading away before the sons of the White Spirit? Was not the Cornish
tongue, and were not the old Cornish manners, for ever lost to earth, on
the day when the old shrewish fishwife, Dolly Pentrath, departed this
life towards the middle of the reign of King George III.? Seeing these
things are so, and that "all beneath the moon doth suffer change," why
should coachmen endure for ever? But our consolation was poured into
deaf ears, and some two years afterwards we recognized our desponding
Jehu under the mournful disfigurements of the driver of a hearse. The
days of pedlars and stage-coachmen have reached their eve, and look not
for restoration. They are waning into the Hades of extinct races, with
the sumpnours and the limitours of the Canterbury Pilgrims.

We have described some of the difficulties and dangers to which
travellers were subjected in the days of Old Roads. Yet the ancient
Highways were not without their attending compensations. Pleasant it was
to travel in company, as Chaucer voucheth: pleasant to linger by the way,
as Montaigne testifies. To meditative and imaginative persons there was
delight in sauntering through a fair country, viewing leisurely its
rivers, meadows, hills, and towns. Burton prescribes travelling among
his cures for melancholy, and he would not have recommended railway speed
or even a fast coach to sad and timid men. His advice presupposed sober
progress, gliding down rivers, patient winding round lofty hills,
contemplation by woodsides and in green meadows, relaxation not tension
of nerve and brain. "No better physick," he says, "for a m