are said to have had numbers and great variety of
cars of all kinds, were so exclusively confined to the use of horses and
mules, that scarcely any other mode of conveyance was known even in
London, and this so late as in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the
first; for it is certain that when the great Shakespeare fled from his
country and came to town, his first means of subsistence were the
pittances he might earn by holding the horses of the persons who had come
from different parts of London to see the plays then performed at the
Bankside Theatre.

It is not indeed to be asserted that till the eighteenth century our
roads never received any repairs, for necessity would frequently call for
something of the kind in most places; nor yet that Toll Bars were
antiently wholly unknown; for it is certain that a Gate or Bar was first
erected in the reign of Edward the first, at a place now called Holborn
Bars in London, for the purpose of collecting tolls for the repairs of
the roads. But it must be allowed that the art of constructing a good
and firm road was ill understood, and worse attended to; and when, in the
beginning of the last century, turnpike roads were first made, it was
imagined that the only good form was that of a ridge and furrow lying
across the road on the line of its direction. Turnpike gates were also
in many places considered as such impositions that even in the beginning
of the reign of George the second, some persons contested the payment,
several were frequently seen together, especially at newly erected gates,
suffering an interruption in their journey rather than submit to what
they deemed an imposition. Every one who understands the true
conveniences of life will rejoice, that both the formation and repairs of
roads, and also the usefulness of turn-pike tolls are now better
understood; that even countries once held to be inaccessible are now open
at all times and at all seasons to the traveller, and that most of our
roads are now so well suited to the purposes not only of convenience but
of pleasure, that we have no reason to lament the destruction of the
Roman ways, or even not to think that we have within these few years
greatly surpassed them in the expedition of our mails and all the
conveniences and comforts of travelling.

On this western side of the town, where its environs afford the
attraction of woody scenery, the stranger is invited to prolong his
stroll round _Ruding's Walk_. Thi