year or two on the shores of the
Atlantic, or whether he kept staghounds on the frontiers of Dacia.
Nearly every Roman indeed had qualified himself before he was fifty to be
a candidate for the Travellers' Club; and sometimes the fine gentleman,
who declined taking an active part in public affairs, found himself
unexpectedly a thousand miles from home, with an imperial rescript in his
portmanteau enjoining him not to return to Rome without special leave.

To such a compulsory journey was the poet Ovid condemned, apparently for
his very particular attentions to the Princess Julia. His exile was a
piece of ingenious cruelty. He was sent to Tomi, which was far beyond
the range of all fashionable bathing-places. The climate was atrocious;
the neighbourhood was worse; the wine was execrable and was often hard
frozen, and eaten like a lozenge, and his only society was that of the
barracks, or a few rich but unpolished corn-factors, who speculated in
grain and deals on the shores of the Euxine. To write verses from morn
to dewy eve was the unfortunate poet's only solace: and he sent so many
reams of elegies to Rome, that his friends came at last to vote him a
bore, and he was reduced, for want of fitting audience, to learn the
Getic language, and read his lacrymose couplets to circles of gaping
barbarians.

A few of our readers may remember the family coach in which county
magnates rode in procession to church, to Quarter sessions, and on all
occasions of ceremony and parade. The Landau, so fast disappearing from
our streets and roads, was but a puny bantling of a vehicle in comparison
with the older and more august conveyance. As the gentlemen rode on
horseback, and the ladies upon pillions, on all but the great epochs of
their lives, this wheeled mammoth was rarely drawn out of its cavern, the
coach-house. For not even when in full dress, raised from the ground by
red-heeled shoes resembling a Greek _cothurnus_, and with a cubit added
to their stature by a mural battlement of hair, did the ladies of the
eighteenth century disdain to jog soberly behind a booted butler with
pistols in his holsters, and a Sir Cloudesley Shovel beaver on his head.
{48} "We have heard an ancient matron tell of her riding nine miles to
dinner behind a portly farm bailiff, and with her hair dressed like that
of Madame de Maintenon, which, being interpreted, means that the locks
with which nature had supplied her were further aggravated by