r courtesies when
travelling on "urgent business." On arriving at the morning or noontide
baiting-place, and after mustering in the common room of the inn, the
first thing to be done was to appoint a chairman, who mostly retained his
post of honour during the journey. At the breakfast or dinner there was
none of that indecorous hurry in eating and drinking which marks our
degenerate days. Had the travellers affected such thin potations as tea
and soup, there was ample time for them to cool. But they preferred the
sirloin and the tankard; and that no feature of a generous reception
might be wanting, the landlord would not fail to recommend his crowning
cup of sack or claret. The coachman, who might now and then feel some
anxiety to proceed, would yet merely admonish his fare that the day was
wearing on; but his scruples would vanish before a grace-cup, and he
would even connive at a proposal to take a pipe of tobacco, before the
horn was permitted to summon the passengers to resume their places.
Hence the great caution observable in the newspaper advertisements of
coach-travelling. We have now before us an announcement of the kind,
dated in the year 1751. It sets forth that, God willing, the new
Expedition coach! will leave the Maid's Head, Norwich, on Wednesday or
Thursday morning, at seven o'clock, and arrive at the Boar in Aldgate on
the Friday or Saturday, "as shall seem good" to the majority of the
passengers. It appears from the appellation of the vehicle, "the new
Expedition," that such a rate of journeying was considered to be an
advance in speed, and an innovation worthy of general notice and
patronage. Fifty years before the same journey had occupied a week; and
in 1664 Christopher Milton, the poet's brother, and afterwards one of
King James II.'s justices, had taken eight-and-forty hours to go from the
_Belle Sauvage_ to Ipswich! At the same period the stage-coach which ran
between London and Oxford required two days for a journey which is now
performed in about two hours on the Great Western line. The stage to
Exeter occupied four days. In 1703, when Prince George of Denmark
visited the stately mansion of Petworth, with the view of meeting Charles
III. of Spain, the last nine miles of the journey took six hours.
Several of the carriages employed to convey his retinue were upset or
otherwise injured; and an unlucky courier in attendance complains that
during fourteen hours he never once alighted, exc