ept when the coach
overturned or was stuck in the mud.

Direction-posts in the seventeenth century were almost unknown. Thoresby
of Leeds, the well-known antiquary, relates in his Diary, that he had
well-nigh lost his way on the great north road, one of the best in the
kingdom, and that he actually lost himself between Doncaster and York.
Pepys, travelling with his wife in his own carriage, lost his way twice
in one short hour, and on the second occasion narrowly escaped passing a
comfortless night on Salisbury Plain. So late indeed as the year 1770 no
material improvement had been effected in road-making. The highways of
Lancashire, the county which gave to the world the earliest important
railroad, were peculiarly infamous. Within the space of eighteen miles a
traveller passed three carts broken down by ruts four feet deep, that
even in summer floated with mud, and which were mended with large loose
stones shot down at random by the surveyors. So dangerous were the
Lancashire thoroughfares that one writer of the time charges all
travellers to shun them as they would the devil, "for a thousand to one
they break their necks or their limbs by overthrows or breaking down."
In the winter season stage-coaches were laid up like so many ships during
Arctic frosts, since it was impossible for any number of horses to drag
them through the intervening impediments, or for any strength of wheel or
perch to resist the rugged and precipitous inequalities of the roads.
"For all practical purposes," as Mr. Macaulay remarks, "the inhabitants
of London were further from Reading than they are now from Edinburgh, and
further from Edinburgh than they are now from Vienna."

France generally is still far behind Britain in all the appurtenances of
swift and easy travelling. In the eighteenth century it was relatively
at par with this country. The following misadventures of Voltaire and
two female companions, when on an excursion from Paris to the provinces,
are thus sketched by the pen of Thomas Carlyle:--

"Figure a lean and vivid-tempered philosopher starting from Paris,
under cloud of night, during hard frost, in a large lumbering coach,
or rather waggon, compared with which indeed the generality of modern
waggons were a luxurious conveyance. With four starved and perhaps
spavined hacks, he slowly sets forth under a mountain of bandboxes.
At his side sits the wandering virago, Marquise du Chatelet, in front