Chapter 2

We have a few data of the speed possible in travelling on extraordinary occasions. We select one of each kind—that of the mounted express and that of the Great Lady who kept her carriage, as the extremes, so far as regards the instruments of conveyance. For a horseman can go where a wheel-carriage cannot find a track: and on the other hand, the traveller on foot can generally choose a more direct line of movement, than is practicable for the four-footed servant of man, encumbered with his rider and his furniture.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, theherald of the king of Scotland, who, it may be supposed, carried with him a royal mandate to be first served by the livery stables, was allowed forty days to reach the Border from London, although it appears that Robert Bruce took only seven to put the Border between himself and Gloucester. But neither Bruce nor the mother of Richard II., who came in one day from Canterbury to London, can be taken as precedents of ordinary speed. For the one had received a significant hint from some friendly courtier—a pair of spurs baked in a pie—that King Edward was in high dudgeon with him, and could not dine with either appetite or good digestion, until he had seen Bruce’s head: and of the Queen dowager is it not written that “she never durst tarry on the waye,” for Wat Tyler was behind her, vowing vengeance upon all principalities and powers? Howbeit her majesty was so thoroughly jolted and unsettled by the “slapping pace” at which she travelled, that she had a bilious attack forthwith, and was “sore syke, and like to die.”

To the difficulty of transit on roads was owing the establishment of great annual fairs, still imperfectly represented by our Wakes, Statute-fairs, and periodical assemblages of itinerant vendors of goods. These commercial re-unions are still common in the East, and still frequent in Central Europe; although in England, where every hamlet has now happily its general shop, and where the townsrival the metropolis in the splendour of gas-lamps and the glory of plate-glass windows, such Fairs have degenerated into yearly displays of giants, dwarfs, double-bodied calves, and gorgeous works in gingerbread. To our ancestors, with their simpler habits of living, supply and demand, these annual meetings served as permanent divisions of the year. The good housewife who bought her woollens and her grocery, the yeoman who chose his frieze-coat, his gay waistcoat, and the leathern integuments of his sturdy props, once only in twelve months, would compute the events of his life after the following fashion:—“It happened three months after last Bury or Chester Fair;” or, “Please Heaven, the bullocks shall be slaughtered the week before the next Statute.” Nay, dates were often extracted, in the courts of justice, by the help of such periodical memoranda. The Church of Rome, with its unerring skill in absorbing and insinuating itself into all the business or pleasures of mankind, did not overlook these popular gatherings. And if the ascetic Anthony, the sturdy Christopher, or that “painful martyr,” St. Bartholomew, minded earthly matters in the regions of their several beatitudes, they must have been often more scandalized than edified by the boisterous amusements of those who celebrated their respective Feasts. In these particulars, however, Ecclesiastical Rome was merely a borrower from its elder Pagan sister. The Compitalia of ancient Rome were street-fairsdedicated to the worship of local deities, and the Thirty cities of Latium held annually, on the slope of the Alban Mount, a great fair as well as a great council of Duumviri and Decuriones. To the ancient fairs of Southern Italy we are indebted for one of our oldest and most agreeable acquaintances. The swinging puppets of the Oscans were gradually confined within a portable box, and danced or gesticulated upon a miniature stage. Their dumb-show was relieved by the extemporary jests and songs of the showman, until at length, one propitious morning, some Homer or Shakspeare of the streets conceived the sublime idea of embodying these scattered rays of satire and jest in the portly person of—Mr. Punch.

The original fair of the East and mediæval Europe was one of the most instructive and picturesque spectacles among the many gatherings of the human race. The Great Fair of Novogorod assembled, and still continues to assemble, myriads of nearly every colour and costume: and in the market of “the Sledded Russ” the small-eyed Chinese stood side by side with the ebony-complexioned native of Guinea. Among the many pictures which Sir Thomas Browne desired to see painted was “a delineation of the Great Fair of Almachara in Arabia, which, to avoid the great heat of the sun, is kept in the night, and by the light of the moon.” The worthy and learned knight does not mention the Great Fair of theHurdwar, in the northernpart of Hindostan, where a confluence of many millions of human beings is brought together under the mixed influences of devotion and commercial business, and, dispersing as rapidly as it has been evoked, the crowd “dislimns and leaves not a wrack behind.” But fairs and general enterprise and opulence are not coeval: neither do they flourish in an age of iron roads and steam-carriages. In fact, they were the results of the inconvenience attendant upon travelling. It was once easier for goods to come to customers than for customers to leave their homes in search of goods. Inland trade was heavily crippled by the badness and insecurity of the highways. The carriages in which produce was conveyed were necessarily massive and heavy in their structure, to enable them to resist the roughness of the ways. Sometimes they were engulfed in bogs, sometimes upset in dykes, and generally they rolled heavily along tracks little less uneven than the roofs of houses.

As a direct result of these obstacles to speedy locomotion, the fruits of the earth, in the winter months, when the roads were broken up or flooded, were consumed by damp and worms in one place, while a few miles further on they might have been disposed of at high prices. Turf was burned in the stoves of London, long after coals were in daily use in the northern counties; and petitions were presented to the Houses of Parliament in the reign of Henry VIII., deprecating the destruction of growingtimber for the supply of hearth-fuel. Nor were these miry and uneven ways by any means exempt from toll; on the contrary, the chivalry of the Cambrian Rebecca might have been laudably exercised in clearing the thoroughfares of these unconscionable barriers. It was a costly day’s journey to ride through the domain of a lord abbot or an acred baron. The bridge, the ferry, the hostelry, the causeway across the marshes, had each its several perquisite. Exportation from abroad was oftener cheaper than production at home. It answered better to import cloth from Flanders than to weave and bring it from York: and land carriage from Norwich to London was nearly as burdensome as water-carriage from Lisbon. Coals, manure, grain, minerals, and leather were transported on the backs of cattle. An ambassador going or returning from abroad was followed by as numerous a retinue as if he had ridden forth conquering and to conquer. Nor were his followers merely for state or ceremony, but indispensable to his comfort, since the horses and mules which bore his suite carried also the furniture of his bed-room and kitchen, owing to the clumsiness of wheel-carriages. If, as was sometimes the case, a great lord carried half an estate on his back, he often consumed the other half in equipping and feeding his train: and among the pleasures utterly unknown to the world for more than five thousand years is, that both peer and peasant may now travel from Middlesex to anyportion of the known world with only an umbrella and carpet-bag.

We have alluded in our sketch of the earliest roads to the general character of early travelling; but a few words in connection with roads remain to be said on that subject. Travelling for pleasure—taking what our grandfathers were wont to call theGrand Tour—were recreations almost unknown to the ancient world. If Plato went into Egypt, it was not to ascend the Nile, nor to study the monumental pictures of a land whose history was graven on rocks, but to hold close colloquy on metaphysics or divinity with the Dean and Chapter at Memphis. The Greeks indeed, fortunately for posterity, had an incredible itch for Egyptian yarns, and no sooner had King Psammetichus given them a general invitation to the Delta, than they flocked thither from Athens and Smyrna, and Cos and Sparta, and the parts of Italy about Thurium, with their heads full of very particular questions, and often, to judge by their reports of what they heard, with ears particularly open to any answers the Egyptian clergy might please to give. Yet pleasure was not the object of their journey. Science, as themselves said, curiosity, as their enemies alleged, was the motive for their encountering perils by land and water. Indeed we recollect only three travellers, either among the Greeks or Romans, who can properly be considered as journeying for pleasure. These were Herodotus—the prince oftourists, past, present, or to come,—Paullus Æmilius, and Cæsar Germanicus.

Herodotus, there is reason to suspect, did not himself penetrate far into Asia, but gathered many of his stories from the merchants and mariners who frequented the wine-shops of Ephesus and Smyrna. Considering the sources of his information, and the license of invention accorded to travellers in all ages, the Halicarnassian was reasonably sceptical: and generally warns his readers when he is going to tell them “a bouncer,” by the words “so at least they told me,” or “so the story goes.” Paullus Æmilius travelled like a modern antiquary and connoisseur. And for beholding the master-pieces of Grecian art in their original splendour and in their proper local habitations, never had tourist better opportunities. A negotiation was pending between the Achæan League and the Roman Commonwealth; and since the preliminaries were rather dull, and Flaminius felt himself bored by the doubts and ceremonies of the delegates, he left them in the lurch to draw up their treaty, and took a holiday tour himself in the Peloponnesus. At that time not a single painting, statue, or bas-relief had been carried off to Italy. The Roman villas were decorated with the designs of Etrurian artists alone, or, at the most, had imported their sculpture and picture galleries from Thurii and Tarentum. Flaminius therefore gazed upon the entire mass of Hellenic art; and the only thing he, unfortunatelyfor us, neglected, was to keep a journal, and provide for its being handed down to posterity.

Germanicus, who had beheld many of these marvels in the Forum and Palaces of Rome—for the Roman generals resembled the late Marshal Soult in the talent of appropriating what they admired—reserved his curiosity for Egypt alone, and traversed from Alexandria to Syene the entire valley of the Nile, listening complacently to all the legends which the priests deemed fitting to rehearse to Roman ears. He was of course treated with marked attention. Memnon’s statue sounded its loudest chord at the first touch of the morning ray; the priests, in their ceremonial habiliments, read to him the inscriptions on the walls of the great Temple at Carnac—and proved to him that after all the Roman empire was no “great shakes;” since a thousand years before, Rameses III. had led more nations behind his chariot, and exacted heavier tributes of corn, wine, and oil from all who dwelt between the White Nile and the Caspian Sea. His journey however was so unprecedented a step, that it brought him into trouble with Tiberius. The Emperor was half afraid that Germanicus had some designs upon the kingdom of Egypt, and as that land happened to be the granary of Rome, the jealous autocrat thought of the possibility of short-commons and a bread-riot in the Forum. But even if the tourist had no ulterior views, the Emperor thought that it did not look like business for aproconsul to be making holiday without leave,—and he accordingly reprimanded his adopted son by letter, and scolded him in a speech to the senate. In our days the Emperor of Russia would look equally black on a field-marshal who should come without license to London for the season; and the Mandarin, who lately exhibited himself in the Chinese Junk, would do well for the future to eschew the Celestial Empire and its ports and harbours entirely,—at least if he have as much consideration for his personal comfort, as his sleek appearance indicated.

The Emperor Hadrian might have been added to the list of ancient travellers in search of the picturesque, both because he visited nearly every province of his empire, and because he expended good round sums wherever he went, in restoring, re-edifying, or beautifying the public edifices which the provincials had suffered to fall into decay. But Hadrian’s journeys were primarily journeys of business; he wished, like the Czar Nicholas, to see with his own eyes how matters went on, and at times he had the felicity of catching a prefect in the very act of filling his pockets and squeezing the provincials: we cannot therefore put him to the account of those who journeyed for pleasure. Every Roman who took any part in public affairs was, in fact, a great traveller. If he served his sixteen or twenty years in the legions, and was not enrolled in the household troops, he was singularly unluckyif his company were not quartered in Asia, Africa, and the Danubian provinces. If he became prætor or consul, a provincial government awaited him at the close of his year of office; and it depended upon the billets drawn in the Senate, whether he spent a 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 Greekcothurnus, 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 anancient 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 being drawn tight over a leathern cushion—a fashion which Jonathan Oldbuck denounces as “fit only for Mahound or Termagaunt.” The production of the coach was therefore the sign of a white or black day in the family calendar—inasmuch as it indicated either marriage or funeral, the approach of the Royal Judges or the execution of a state prisoner, the drawing for the militia, or a county address to both Houses of Parliament on the crying grievance of the Excise. It doubtless took some days to prepare the imperator’schariot for a Roman triumph: it must have employed nearly as many to clean and furbish the capacious body of the modern vehicle. There was moreover a whole armoury of harness to mend and polish; and as the six long-tailed Flemish horses were not often in the traces together, some time was required by them to unlearn the rustic habits of the farm-yard, and to regain the stately trot at which, where the roads would admit of it, they ordinarily proceeded. The following description of a journey to London by an M.P. of 1699 will convey to the reader a lively yet tolerably exact conception both of the glory and inconveniences of travelling in those days. It is taken from Vanbrugh’s comedy of the ‘Journey to London,’ better known in its modern form of ‘The Provoked Husband.’

“James. Sir, Sir, do you hear the news? They are all a-coming.“Uncle Richard. Ay, Sirrah, I hear it.“James. Sir, here’s John Moody arrived already: he’s stumping about the streets in his dirty boots, and asking every man he meets, if they can tell him where he may have a good lodging for a parliament-man, till he can hire such a house as becomes him. He tells them his lady and all the family are coming too; and that they are so nobly attended, they care not a fig for anybody. Sir, they have added two cart-horses to the four old geldings, because my lady will have it said shecame to town in a coach and six—heavy George the ploughman rides postilion.“U. Richard. Very well, the journey begins as it should do. Dost know whether they bring all the children with them?“James. Only Squire Humphrey and Miss Betty, Sir; the other six are put to board at half-a-crown a week a head, with Joan Growse at Smoke-dunghill-farm.“U. Richard. The Lord have mercy upon all good folks! What work will these people make! Dost know when they’ll be here?“James. John says, Sir, they’d have been here last night, but that the old wheezy-belly horse tired, and the two fore-wheels came crash down at once in Waggon-rut Lane. Sir, they were cruelly loaden, as I understand: my lady herself, he says, laid on four mail trunks, besides the great deal-box, which fat Tom sat upon behind.“U. Richard. So!“James. Then, within the coach there was Sir Francis, my lady, the great fat lap-dog, Squire Humphrey, Miss Betty, my lady’s maid, Mrs. Handy, and Doll Tripe the cook; but she puked with sitting backwards, so they mounted her into the coach-box.“U. Richard. Very well.“James. Then, Sir, for fear of a famine before they should get to the baiting-place, there was such baskets of plum-cake, Dutch gingerbread, Cheshirecheese, Naples biscuits, maccaroons, neats’ tongues and cold boiled beef; and in case of sickness, such bottles of usquebaugh, black-cherry brandy, cinnamon-water, sack, tent, and strong beer, as made the old coach crack again.“U. Richard. Well said.“James. And for defence of this good cheer and my lady’s little pearl necklace, there was the family basket-hilt sword, the great Turkish scimitar, the old blunderbuss, a good bag of bullets, and a great horn of gunpowder.“U. Richard. Admirable!“James. Then for bandboxes, they were so bepiled up—to Sir Francis’s nose, that he could only peep out at a chance hole with one eye, as if he were viewing the country through a perspective-glass.”

“James. Sir, Sir, do you hear the news? They are all a-coming.

“Uncle Richard. Ay, Sirrah, I hear it.

“James. Sir, here’s John Moody arrived already: he’s stumping about the streets in his dirty boots, and asking every man he meets, if they can tell him where he may have a good lodging for a parliament-man, till he can hire such a house as becomes him. He tells them his lady and all the family are coming too; and that they are so nobly attended, they care not a fig for anybody. Sir, they have added two cart-horses to the four old geldings, because my lady will have it said shecame to town in a coach and six—heavy George the ploughman rides postilion.

“U. Richard. Very well, the journey begins as it should do. Dost know whether they bring all the children with them?

“James. Only Squire Humphrey and Miss Betty, Sir; the other six are put to board at half-a-crown a week a head, with Joan Growse at Smoke-dunghill-farm.

“U. Richard. The Lord have mercy upon all good folks! What work will these people make! Dost know when they’ll be here?

“James. John says, Sir, they’d have been here last night, but that the old wheezy-belly horse tired, and the two fore-wheels came crash down at once in Waggon-rut Lane. Sir, they were cruelly loaden, as I understand: my lady herself, he says, laid on four mail trunks, besides the great deal-box, which fat Tom sat upon behind.

“U. Richard. So!

“James. Then, within the coach there was Sir Francis, my lady, the great fat lap-dog, Squire Humphrey, Miss Betty, my lady’s maid, Mrs. Handy, and Doll Tripe the cook; but she puked with sitting backwards, so they mounted her into the coach-box.

“U. Richard. Very well.

“James. Then, Sir, for fear of a famine before they should get to the baiting-place, there was such baskets of plum-cake, Dutch gingerbread, Cheshirecheese, Naples biscuits, maccaroons, neats’ tongues and cold boiled beef; and in case of sickness, such bottles of usquebaugh, black-cherry brandy, cinnamon-water, sack, tent, and strong beer, as made the old coach crack again.

“U. Richard. Well said.

“James. And for defence of this good cheer and my lady’s little pearl necklace, there was the family basket-hilt sword, the great Turkish scimitar, the old blunderbuss, a good bag of bullets, and a great horn of gunpowder.

“U. Richard. Admirable!

“James. Then for bandboxes, they were so bepiled up—to Sir Francis’s nose, that he could only peep out at a chance hole with one eye, as if he were viewing the country through a perspective-glass.”

The “blunderbuss, Turkish scimitar, and basket-hilt sword,” in the foregoing extract from Vanbrugh, point to one of the constant perils of the road—the highwaymen. Lady Wronghead was lucky in bringing her “little pearl necklace” safe to London. Turpin’s scouts, a few years later, would have obtained more accurate information of the rich moveables packed in the squire’s coach. But as yet Turpin and Bradshaw were not. The great road from York to London however lay always under an evil reputation. It was by this line that Jeannie Deans walked to London, and verified the remark of her sagacious host, the Bonifaceof Beverley, that the road would be clear of thieves when Groby Pool was thatched with pancakes—and not till then. The example of Robin Hood was, for centuries after his death, zealously followed by the more adventurous spirits of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Yorkshire; and their enterprising genius was well seconded by the fine breed of horses for which those counties were famous. For cross-country work the Leicestershire blades had no fellows; and had the Darlington Hunt existed in those days, they would doubtless have been first a-field in the morning and last on the road at night. Nor were there any reasons in their dress, demeanour, or habits, why they should not consort with the best of the shire either when riding to cover, or celebrating the triumphs of the day afterward in the squire’s hall, or the ale-house. Some of these redressers of the inequalities of fortune were of excellent houses,—younger sons, who having no profession—trade would have been disgraceful in their eyes—grew weary of an unvarying round of shooting, fishing, otter-hunting, and badger-baiting, and aspired, like their common ancestor Nimrod, to be hunters of men. Others had found the discipline of a regiment unpleasant, or had been unjust serving men. In short, the road, about a century and a half ago, was the general refuge of all who, like the recruits that flocked to King David at Adullam, were in distress or discontented. Mail-coach drivers and guards travelled armed to the teeth, booted tothe hips, with bandeliers across their capacious chests, and three-cornered hats which, in conjunction with their flowing horse-hair wigs, were both sword- and bullet-proof. Passengers who had any value for their lives and limbs, when they booked themselves at London for Exeter or York, provided themselves with cutlasses and blunderbusses, and kept as sharp look-out from the coach-windows as travellers in our day are wont to do in the Mexican diligences. We remember to have seen a print of the year 1769 in which the driver of the Boston mail is represented in the armed guise of Sir Hudibras. He carries a horse-pistol in his belt, and acouteau de chasseslung over his shoulder, while the guard is accoutred with no less than three pistols and a basket-hilt sword, besides having a carbine strapped to his seat behind the coach. Between the coachman’s feet is a small keg, which might indifferently contain “genuine Nantz” or gunpowder. One of the “insides,” an ancient gentleman in a Ramilies wig, is seen through the capacious window of the coach affectionately hugging a carbine, and a yeoman on the roof is at once caressing a bull-dog, and supporting a bludgeon that might have served Dandie Dinmont himself. Yet all these precautions, offensive or defensive, were frequently of no avail: the gentlemen of the road were still better armed, or more adroit in handling their weapons. Hounslow Heath on the great western road, and Finchley Commonon the great northern road, were to the wayfarers for many generations nearly as terrible as the Valley of the Shadow of Death. “The Cambridge scholars,” says Mr. Macaulay, “trembled when they approached Epping Forest, even in broad daylight. Seamen who had just been paid off at Chatham were often compelled to deliver their purses at Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years earlier by the greatest of poets as the scene of the depredations of Poins and Falstaff.” The terrors of one generation become the sources of romance and amusement to later times. Four hundred years ago we should have regarded William of Deloraine as an extremely commonplace and inconvenient personage: he is now much more interesting than the armour in the Tower, or than a captain or colonel of the Guards. A century back we should have slept the more soundly for the knowledge that Jack Sheppard was securely swinging in chains; but in these piping times of peace his biography has extracted from the pockets of the public more shillings than the subject of it himself ever ‘nabbed’ on the king’s highway. It is both interesting and instructive to observe how directly the material improvements of science act upon the moral condition of the world. As soon as amended roads admitted of more rapid movement from place to place, the vocation of the highway robber was at first rendered difficult, and in the end impossible to exercise on the greater thoroughfares. Fasthorse-coaches were the first obstacle. Railways have became an insuperable impediment to “life on the road.”

Charles Lamb indited one of his most pleasant essays upon the ‘Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis.’ In the rural districts vagrancy and mendicity still survive, in spite of constabulary forces and petty sessions. But the mendicity of the nineteenth century presents a very different spectacle from the mendicity of the seventeenth. The well-remembered beggar is no longer the guest of the parish-parson; the king’s bedesmen have totally vanished; no one now supplicates for alms under a corporation-seal; nor is the mendicant regarded as second only to the packman as the general newsmonger of a neighbourhood. Who does not remember the description of foreign beggars in the ‘Sentimental Journey’? Many of us have witnessed the loathsome appearance and humorous importunity of Irish mendicants. A century ago England rivalled both France and Ireland in the number of its professional beggars. In the days when travelling was mostly performed on horseback, the foot of the hills—the point where the rider drew bridle—was the station of the mendicant, and long practice enabled him to proportion his clamorous petitions to the length of the ascent.[56]The old soldier in ‘Gil Blas’ stood bythe wayside with a carbine laid across two sticks, and solicited, or rather enforced, the alms of the passer-by, by an appeal to his fears no less than to his pity. The readers of the old drama will recall to mind the shifts and devices of the ‘Jovial Beggars;’—how easily a wooden leg was slipped off and turned into a bludgeon; how inscrutable were the disguises, and how copious and expressive the slang, of the mendicant crew. Coleridge has justly described ‘The Beggar’s Bush’ as one of the most pleasant of Fletcher’s comedies; and if the Spanish novelists do not greatly belie the roads of their land, the mendicant levied his tolls on the highways as punctually as the king himself. Speed in travelling has been as prejudicial to these merry and unscrupulous gentry as acts against vagrancy or the policeman’s staff. He should be a sturdy professor of his art who would pour forth his supplications on a railway platform; and Belisarius himself would hardly venture to stop a modern carriage for the chance of anobolus, to be flung from its window. A few of the craft indeed linger in bye-roads and infest our villages and streets; butichabod!—itsglory has departed; and the most humane or romantic of travellers may without scruple consign the modern collector of highway alms to the tender mercies of the next policeman and the reversion of the treadmill.

The modern highway is seldom in a direct line. A hill, a ford, or a wood sufficed to render it circuitous. All roads indeed through hilly countries were originally struck out by drivers of pack-horses, who, to avoid bogs, chose the upper ground. Roads were first made the subject of legislation in England in the sixteenth century: until then, they had been made at will and repaired at pleasure. A similar neglect of uniformity may be seen in Hungary and in Eastern Europe generally, even in the present day. The roads are made by each county, and as it depends in great measure upon the caprice or convenience of the particular proprietors or townships whether there shall be a road at all, or whether it shall be at all better than a drift-way or a bridle-track, it often happens that after bowling along for a score of miles upon a highway worthy of Macadam, the carriage of the traveller plunges into wet turf or heavy sand, merely because it has entered upon the boundary of a new county. Nay, even where the roads have been hitherto good, it often happens that the new Vicegespann, or Sheriff, a personage on whose character a good deal depends in county business, allows them to go to ruin for want of seasonable repairs. A similarirregularity was, in our own country, put a stop to in the reign of Mary, when it was enacted that each parish should maintain its own roads. A custom was borrowed from the feudal system: the lord of the manor was empowered to demand from his vassals certain portions of their labour, including the use of such rude implements as were then in use. The peasant was bound by the tenure of his holding, to aid in cutting, carting, and housing his lord’s hay and corn, to repair his bridges, and to mend his roads. A portion of such services was, in the sixteenth century, transferred from the lord to the parish or the district; and the charges of repairing the highways and bridges fell upon the copyholder. He was compelled to give his labour for six days in the year, and his work was apportioned and examined by a surveyor. If this compulsory labour did not suffice, hired labour was defrayed by a parochial rate: and although the obligation is seldom enforced, yet it survives in letter in the majority of the court-rolls of our manors.

So entirely indeed was speed in travelling regarded by our ancestors as of secondary importance to safety and convenience, that even in journeying by a public coach the length of a day’s journey was often determined by the vote of the passengers. The better or worse accommodation of the roadside inns was taken into account; and it was “mine host’s” interest to furnish good ale andbeef, since he was tolerably certain that, with such attractions within-doors, the populous and heavy-laden mail would not pass by the sign of the Angel or the Griffin. Long and ceremonious generally were the meals of our forefathers; nor did they abate one jot from their 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 setsforth 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 theBelle Sauvageto 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, except when the coach overturned or was stuck in the mud.

Direction-posts in the seventeenth century were almost unknown. Thoresby of Leeds, the well-knownantiquary, 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 thanthey 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 Châtelet, in front of him a serving maid, with additional bandboxes,et divers effets de sa maîtresse. At the next stage the postilions have to be beat up: they came out swearing. Cloaks and fur-pelisses avail little against the January cold; ‘time and hours’ are the only hope. But lo! at the tenth mile, this Tyburn coach breaks down. One many-voiced discordant wail shrieks through the solitude, making night hideous—but in vain: the axle-tree has given way; the vehicle has overset, and marchionesses, chamber-maids, bandboxes, and philosophers are weltering in inextricable chaos. The carriage was in the stage nextNangis, about half-way to that town, when the hind axle-tree broke, and it tumbled on the road to M. de Voltaire’s side. Madame du Châtelet and her maid fell above him, with all their bundles and bandboxes, for these were not tied to the front but only piled up on both hands of the maid; and so, observing the law of gravitation and equilibrium of bodies, they rushed toward the corner where M. de Voltaire lay squeezed together. Under so many burdens, which half-suffocated him, he kept shouting bitterly; but it was impossible to change place; all had to remain as it was till the two lackeys, one of whom was hurt by the fall, could come up, with the postilions, to disencumber the vehicle; they first drew out all the luggage, next the women, and then M. de Voltaire. Nothing could be got out except by the top, that is, by the coach-door, which now opened upwards. One of the lackeys and a postilion, clambering aloft and fixing themselves on the body of the vehicle, drew them up as from a well, seizing the first limb that came to hand, whether arm or leg, and then passed them down to the two stationed below, who set them firmly on the ground.”

It was not entirely for state or distinction of ranks that noblemen of yore were attended on their journeys by running footmen. A few supernumerary hands were needed in case of accidents on the road. A box of carpenters’ tools formed an indispensable part of the baggage, and theaccompanying lackeys were skilful in handling them, as well as in replacing the cast shoes of the horses, for many districts would not afford a Wayland Smith. The state of travelling was doubtless increased by these ‘cursive appendages, bearing white wands, and decked in the gay liveries of the house which they served. In the ‘Bride of Lammermoor’ we have a graphic picture of these pedestrian accompaniments of the coaches of “Persons of Quality.”

“The privilege of nobility in those days,” says Sir Walter Scott, “had something in it impressive on the imagination: the dresses and liveries, and number of their attendants, their style of travelling, the imposing and almost warlike air of the armed men who surrounded them, placed them far above the laird who travelled with his brace of footmen; and as to rivalry from the mercantile part of the community, these would as soon have thought of imitating the state and equipage of the Sovereign. . . . Two running footmen, dressed in white, with black jockey caps, and long staves in their hands, headed the train; and such was their agility that they found no difficulty in keeping the necessary advance which the etiquette of their station required before the carriage and horsemen. Onward they came at an easy swinging trot, arguing unwearied speed in their long-breathed calling. Behind these glowing meteors, who footed it as if the avenger of blood had been behind them,came a cloud of dust, raised by riders who preceded, attended, or followed, the state-carriage.”

In times when persons of quality journeyed in this stately and sumptuous fashion, it was often needful to mend the roads specially on their account. The approach of a Royal Progress, or the Lord Lieutenant of the county, was a signal for a general ‘turn-out’ of labourers and masons to lay gravel over the most suspicious places, and to render the bridges at least temporarily secure. Scarcely a Quarter sessions in the seventeenth century passed over without presentments from the Grand Jury against certain districts of the county; and few and favoured were the districts which escaped a good round fine from the Judges, as a set-off against the bruises and other damages which their Lordships sustained on their circuit. It was no unusual accident for the Court to be kept waiting many hours for the arrival of the Judge. Either his Lordship had been dug out of a bog, or his official wardrobe had been carried away by a bridgeless stream. Often, too, the patience of jurors was severely tried by the non-appearance of counsel. These inconveniences became more apparent after it had ceased to be the fashion for the Judges and the Bar to travel on horseback from one assize-town to another. Cowper, writing to his pedestrian friend Rose, playfully imagines that when he should attain to the dignity of the ermine, he would institute the practice of ‘walking’the circuit. But equestrian circuits were long in use, and the Bar turned out as if their chase had been deer instead of John Doe and Richard Roe. When however it came to be thought indecorous for a Judge to wear jack-boots, the danger of wheel-carriages was sensibly felt by the luminaries of the law, and the periodical journeys of the votaries of Themis tended directly to the correction of ways as well as to the suppression of vice. A zealous High Sheriff or a loyal Lord Lieutenant would sometimes contribute out of his private purse to the security of the Bench: and the more enterprising towns began to think it concerned their honour that the delegates of Majesty should reach their gates scatheless and unwearied by the toils of the road.

But road-making entrusted to the separate discretion of parochial authorities was often performed in a slovenly, and always in an unsystematic, manner. In adopting a direct or a circuitous line of way innumerable predilections interfered, and parishes not rarely indulged in acrimonious controversies, especially when the time came for walking the boundaries. The dispute between broad and narrow gauges is indeed merely a modern form of a long-standing quarrel. A market-town and a seaport would naturally desire to have ample verge and room enough on their highways for the transport of grain, hides, and timber from the interior, and for carriage of cloth and manufacturedor imported goods to the inland. On the other hand isolated parishes would contend that driftways were all-sufficient for their demands, and that they could house their crops or bring their flour from the mill through the same ruts which had served their forefathers. But in Charles II.’s reign, after the civil wars had given an impetus to the public mind, and while, although our foreign policy was disgraceful, and each cabinet more indecorous than its predecessor, the country at large was steadily advancing in prosperity, this lack of uniformity was acknowledged to be no longer tolerable. Compulsory labour and parochial rates, or hired labour and occasional outlays, were found alike insufficient to ensure good roads. An act was accordingly passed authorizing a small toll to pay the needful expenses. The turnpike-gate to which we are accustomed was originally a bar supported on two posts on the opposite sides of the road, and the collector sat,sub dio, at his seat of customs. It was long however before the advantages of this plan were acknowledged by the people. Riots, resembling the Rebecca riots, were of frequent occurrence in the less-frequented counties: the road-surveyor was as odious as the collector of the chimney-tax; the toll-bar was seen blazing at night; its guardian deemed himself fortunate to escape with a few kicks; and it was not until a much later day that a public or private coach could trundle along the roads without encountering deepand dislocating ruts, or rocking over a surface of unbroken stones. Frost and rain were more effective than the duly appointed surveyor in breaking up these rude materials, and reducing the surface to something resembling a level.

A few years since some of the most strenuous opponents of railways were to be found among the squirearchy. “Why,” argued these rural magnates, “should our woods be levelled and our corn-lands bisected, our game scared away and our parks disfigured by noise and smoke, to suit the convenience of the dingy denizens of Manchester, or the purse-proud merchants of Liverpool?” Similar arguments were urged not more than a century ago against the formation of new turnpike roads. The bittern, it was said, would be driven from his pool, the fox from his earth, the wild fowl would be frightened away from the marshes, and many a fine haunch of venison would be sent to London markets without the proper ceremonies of turning off and running down the buck. Merrie England could not exist without miry roads. In 1760 there was no turnpike road between the port of Lynn and the great corn and cattle market at Norwich. In 1762 an opulent gentleman, who had resided for a generation of mortal life in Lisbon, was desirous to revisit his paternal home among the meres of the eastern counties. His wish was further stimulated by the circumstance that his sister and sole surviving relative dwelt beside one of thegreat Broads, which, in these regions, penetrate far inland from the sea-coast. From London to the capital town of his native county his way was tolerably smooth and prosperous. The distance was about a hundred and ten miles, and by the aid of a mail coach he performed the journey in three days. But now commenced his real labours. Between his sister’s dwelling and the provincial capital lay some twenty miles of alternate ridges of gravel and morass. Had he been a young man he might have walked safely and speedily under the guidance of some frugal swain or tripping dairymaid returning from market. Had he been a wise man he would have hired a nag, and trotted soberly along such bridle-roads as he found. But he was neither a young nor a wise man. His better years had been passed in the counting-houses of Santarem, and his bodily activity was impaired by long and copious infusions of generous old port. So, as he could neither walk nor ride, he deposited his portly and withal somewhat gouty person in a coach-and-six, and set forth upon his fraternal quest. He had little reason to plume himself upon the pomp and circumstance of his equipage. The six hired coach-horses, albeit of the strong Flanders breed, were in a few hours engulfed in a black pool; his coach, or rather his travelling mansion, was inextricably sunk in the same slimy hollow; and the merchant himself, whose journeys had hitherto been made on the sober back of aLusitanian mule, was ignominiously dragged by two cowherds through his coach-windows,—and mounted on one of the wheelers, he was brought back, drenched and weary, to the place whence he set out. In high dudgeon, the purveyor of Bacchus returned to London, and could never be induced to resume the search of his “Anna soror.”

Such imperfect means of transit materially affected both the manners and the intelligence of the age. Postal arrangements indeed existed, but of the rudest kind. It was common for letters to be left at the principal inns on the main road, to be delivered when called for. They remained often in the bar until the address was illegible, or smoke had dyed the paper a saffron-yellow. Special announcements of deaths and births or urgent business were necessarily entrusted to special messengers; and the title and superscription of these privately-sent letters generally contain very minute and even peremptory injunctions of a certain and swift delivery. But for such cautions, a rich uncle might have been quietly inurned without his expectant nephews hearing of his decease; and a whole college kept waiting, till the year of grace had passed, for the news of a fat rector’s much-desired apoplexy. The death of good Queen Bess was not known in some of the remoter parishes of Devonshire until the courtiers of James had ceased to wear mourning for her. The Hebrews of York heard with quivering lips and ashen brows of themassacre of their people in London at Richard I.’s coronation, six weeks after it was perpetrated; and the churches of the Orkneys put up prayers for King James three months after the abdicated monarch had fled to St. Germain’s. There was in nearly all rural districts the king of London and the king of the immediate neighbourhood. The Walpoles and Townshends in their own domains were far more formidable personages than George I.; and at a time when the King of Prussia’s picture was commonly hung out at ale-house doors as an incitement to try the ale,[72]an ancient dame near Doncaster exclaimed, on being informed of his majesty’s decease, “Lord a’ mercy, is he! and, pray, who is to be the new Lord Mayor?”

A considerable improvement in the roads of Great Britain took place in the latter half of the preceding century. This change was partly owingto the advancing civilization of the larger towns and cities, and partly to the march of the Highlanders into England under Prince Charles Edward, in 1745. At that period communication was so imperfect that the Pretender had advanced a hundred miles from Edinburgh without exciting any peculiar alarm in the midland or southern counties, while in the metropolis itself no certain information could be obtained of the movements of the rebel army for some days after their departure southward. The Duke of Cumberland’s march northward was much impeded by the difficulty of transporting his park of artillery. But after the decisive day of Culloden, the erection of Fort William, and the establishment of military posts at the foot of the Grampians, the expediency of readier communication between the capitals of South and North Britain was universally felt. Scotland could henceforward be held in permanent subordination only by means of good military highways. Accordingly in the year 1782 we find a German traveller (Moritz) speaking of the roads in the neighbourhood of London as “incomparable.” He is astonished “how they got them so firm and solid;” and he thus describes his stage of sixteen miles from Dartford, the place of his disembarkation, to the metropolis:—

“Our little party now separated and got into two post-chaises, each of which held three persons, though it must be owned that three cannot sit quite so commodiously in these chaises as two; thehire of a post-chaise is a shilling for every English mile. They may be compared to our extra-posts, because they are to be had at all times. But these carriages are very neat and lightly built, so that you hardly perceive their motion, as they roll along these firm smooth roads; they have windows in front and on both sides; the horses are generally good, and the postilions particularly smart and active, and always ride at a full trot. The one we had wore his hair cut short, a round hat, and a brown jacket, of tolerably fine cloth, with a nosegay in his bosom. Now and then, when he drove very hard, he looked round, and with a smile seemed to solicit our approbation. A thousand charming spots and beautiful landscapes, on which my eye would long have dwelt with rapture, were now rapidly passed with the speed of an arrow.”

It was one of Samuel Johnson’s wishes that he might be driven rapidly in a post-chaise, with a pretty woman, capable of understanding his conversation, for his travelling companion. The smartness of the English postboy was emulated in France,—not, as might have been expected, by his professional brethren, who until very recently retained their ponderous jackboots, three-cornered hats, and heavy knotted whips, but by the younger members ofla haute noblesse. To look like an English jockey or postilion, was long the object of fashionable ambition with Parisian dandies. “Vous me crottez, Monsieur,” said poor patient Louis XVI. to one ofthese exquisite centaurs, as he rode beside the royal carriage near Versailles. “Oui, Sire, à l’Anglaise,” rejoined the self-satisfied dandy, understanding his majesty to have complimented histrotting(trottez), and taking it as a tribute to the skill of his imitation.

Pedlars and packhorses were a necessary accompaniment of bad and narrow roads. The latter have long disappeared from our highways; the former linger in less-frequented districts of the country, but miserably shorn of their former importance. A licensed hawker is now a very unromantic personage. His comings and goings attract no more attention among the rustics or at the squire’s hall than the passing by of a plough or a sheep. The fixed shop has deprived him of his utility, and daily newspapers of his attractions. He is content to sell his waistcoat or handkerchief pieces; but he is no longer the oracle of the village inn or the housekeeper’s room. In the days however when neither draper’s nor haberdasher’s wares could be purchased without taking a day’s journey at the least through miry ways to some considerable market-town, the pedlar was the merchant and newsman of the neighbourhood. He was as loquacious as a barber. He was nearly as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew. He had his winter circuit and his summer circuit. He was as regular in the delivery of news as the postman; nay, he often forestalled that governmentofficial in bringing down the latest intelligence of a landing on the French coast; of an execution at Tyburn; of a meteor in the sky; of a strike at Spitalfields; and of prices in the London markets. He was a favourite with the village crones, for he brought down with him the latest medicines for ague, rheumatism, and the evil. He wrote love-letters for village beauties. He instructed alehouse politicians in the last speech of Bolingbroke, Walpole, or Pitt. His tea, which often had paid no duty, emitted a savour and fragrance unknown to the dried sloe-leaves vended by ordinary grocers. He was the milliner of rural belles. He was the purveyor for village songsters, having ever in his pack the most modern and captivating lace and ribbons, and the newest song and madrigal. He was competent by his experience to advise in the adjustment of top-knots and farthingales, and to show rustic beaux the last cock of the hat and the most approved method of wielding a cane. He was an oral ‘Belle Assemblée.’ He was full of “quips and cranks and wreathed smiles.” ‘Indifferent’ honest, he was not the less welcome for being a bit of a picaroon. Autolycus, the very type of his profession,—and such as the pedlar was in the days of Queen Bess, such also was he in the days of George II.,—was littered under Mercury, and a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. His songs would draw three souls out of one weaver. His pack was furnished with

“Lawn, as white as driven snow;Cyprus, black as e’er was crow;Gloves, as sweet as damask roses,Masks for faces and for noses;Bugle-bracelet, necklace amber,Perfume for a lady’s chamber;Golden quoifs and stomachersFor my lads to give their dears;Pins and poking-sticks of steel,—What maids lack from head to heel.”

Then did he chant after the following fashion, at “holy-ales and festivals”—

“Will you buy any tape,Or lace for your cape,My dainty duck, my dear—a?Any silk, any thread,Any toys for your head,Of the new’st and fin’st, fin’st wear—a?Come to the pedlar,Money’s a meddler,That doth alter all men’s wear—a!”

One accident in pedlar life was some drawback to its general pleasantness. He often bore not only a great charge of goods, but of gold also. His steps were dogged by robbers, and many a skeleton, since disinterred in solitary places, is the mortal framework of some wandering merchant who had met with foul play on his circuit. The packman’s ghost too is no unusual spectre in many of our shires.

How important a personage among thedramatis personæof rural life the pedlar was, at even a recent period, in the northern counties of England, maybe inferred from Wordsworth’s choice of him for the hero of his ‘Excursion.’ Much ridicule, and even obloquy, did the staunch poet of Rydal incur for choosing such a character, when he might have taken Laras and Conrads by the score, and been praised for his choice. But “the vagrant merchant under a heavy load,” being a portion of the mountain life which surrounded the poet’s home, was better than any hero of romance for his purpose; and a younger generation has confirmed the poet’s choice of a hero, and few remain now to mock at the Pedlar. Wordsworth’s pedlar indeed was no Bryce Snailsfoot, nor Donald Bean, nor even such a one as was first cousin to Andrew Fairservice, but rather, by virtue of a poetic diploma, a philosopher of the ancient stamp. For

“From his native hillsHe wandered far; much did he see of men,Their manners, their enjoyments and pursuits,Their passions and their feelings; chiefly thoseEssential and eternal in the heart,That, ’mid the simpler forms of rural lifeExist more simple in their elements,And speak a plainer language. In the woods,A lone enthusiast, and among the fields,Itinerant in this labour, he had passedThe better portion of his time; and thereSpontaneously had his affections thrivenAmid the bounties of the year, the peaceAnd liberty of nature; there he keptIn solitude and solitary thought,His mind in a just equipoise of love.”

Lucian, in his vision of Hades, beheld the Shadesof the Dead set by pitiless Minos or Rhadamanthus to perform tasks most alien to their occupations while they were yet denizens of earth. Nero, according to Rabelais, who improves on Lucian’s hint, was an angler in the Lake of Darkness; Alexander the Great a cobbler of shoes; and “imperial Cæsar 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 shouldcoachmen 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 melancholy man than change of aire and variety of places, to travel abroad and see fashions. Leo Afer speakes of many of his countrymen so cured without all other physick. No man, saithLipsius, in an epistle to Phil. Lanoius, a noble friend of his, now ready to make a voyage, can be such a stock or stone, whom that pleasant speculation of countries, cities, towns, rivers, will not affect. For peregrination charms our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety, that some count him unhappy that never travelled, a kinde of prisoner, and pity his case, that from his cradle to old age beholds the same still; insomuch that Rhasis doth not only commend but enjoyn travell, and such variety of objects to a melancholy man, and to lye in diverse innes, to be drawn into severall companies. A good prospect alone will ease melancholy, as Gomesius contends. The citizens of Barcino, saith he, are much delighted with that pleasant prospect their city hath into the sea, which, like that of old Athens, besides Ægina, Salamina, and other pleasant islands, had all the variety of delicious objects; so are those Neapolitanes and inhabitants of Genua, to see the ships, boats, and passengers go by, out of their windows, their whole cities being sited on the side of an hill like Pera by Constantinople. Yet these are too great a distance: some are especially affected with such objects as be near, to see passengers go by in some great road-way or boats in a river,in subjectum forum despicere, to oversee a fair, a market-place, or out of a pleasant window into some thoroughfare street to behold a continual concourse, a promiscuous rout, coming and going.”

Indifferent roads and uneasy carriages, riding post, and dread of highwaymen, darkness or the inclemency of the seasons, led, as by a direct consequence, to the construction of excellent inns in our island. The superiority of our English hotels in the seventeenth century is thus described by the most picturesque of modern historians:—“From a very early period,” says Mr. Macaulay, “the inns of England had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent accommodation which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found room in the wide chambers and stables of the Tabard, in Southwark. The food was of the best, and the wines such as drew the company to drink largely. Two hundred years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the great hostelries. The continent of Europe, he said, could show nothing like them. There were some in which two or three hundred people, with their horses, could without difficulty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the tapestry, above all the abundance of clean and fine linen was matter of wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, there were signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds.[82]In the seventeenthcentury, England abounded with excellent inns of every rank. The traveller sometimes in a small village lighted on a public-house, such as Walton has described, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the walls were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelt of lavender, and where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and a dish of trout fresh from the neighbouring brook, were to be procured at small charge. At the larger houses of entertainment were to be found beds hung with silk, choice cookery, and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London. The innkeepers too, it was said, were not like other innkeepers. On the continent the landlord was the tyrant of those who crossed his threshold. In England he was a servant. Never was an Englishman more at home than when he took his ease in his inn.

“Many conveniences which were unknown at Hampton Court and Whitehall in the seventeenthcentury, are to be found in our modern hotels. Yet on the whole it is certain that the improvement of our houses of public entertainment has by no means kept pace with the improvement of our roads and conveyances. Nor is this strange; for it is evident that, all other circumstances being supposed equal, the inns will be best where the means of locomotion are worst. The quicker the rate of travelling, the less important is it that there should be numerous agreeable resting-places for the travellers. A hundred and sixty years ago a person who came up to the capital from a remote county generally required twelve or fifteen meals, and lodging for five or six nights by the way. If he were a great man, he expected the meals and lodging to be comfortable and even luxurious. At present we fly from York or Chester to London by the light of a single winter’s day. At present therefore a traveller seldom interrupts his journey merely for the sake of rest and refreshment. The consequence is that hundreds of excellent inns have fallen into decay. In a short time no good houses of that description will be found, except at places where strangers are likely to be detained by business or pleasure.”

Highwaymen, pedlars, inns, coachmen, and well-appointed coaches have now nearly vanished from our roads. Some of the more excellent breeds of English horses have gone with them, or will soon follow them. In another generation noone will survive who has seen a Norfolk hackney. This race of sure-footed indefatigable trotters has already become so few in number that “a child may count them.” “The oldest inhabitant”—that universal referee with some persons on all disputed points—never set eye on a genuine Flemish coach-horse in England; and the gallant high-stepping hybrid—half thoroughbred, half hackney—which whirled along the fast coaches at the rate of twelve miles in the hour will in a few years be nowhere found. The art of ‘putting to’ four horses in a few seconds will become one of the ‘artes deperditæ;’ and the science of driving so as to divide equally the weight and the speed between the team, and to apportion the strength of the cattle to the variations of the road, will have become a tradition. Perfect as mechanism was the discipline of a well-trained leader. He knew the road, and the duty expected of him. Docile and towardly during his seven- or nine-mile stage, he refused to perform more than his allotted task. Attached to his yoke-fellow, he resented the intrusion of a stranger into his harness: and a mere change of hands on the box would often convert the willing steed into a recusant against the collar, whom neither soothing nor severity would induce to budge a step. Some suffering indeed has been spared to the equine world by the substitution of brass and iron for blood and sinews; but the poetry of the road is gone with thequadrigæthat a few years ago tripped lightly and proudly over the level of the Macadamized road. No latter-day Homer will again indite such a verse as

“Ιππων μ’ ὠκυνπόδων ὰμφὶ κτύπος οῠατα βάλλει.”

The Four-in-hand Club is extinct, or, with those ancient charioteers at Troy, courses in Hades over meadows of asphodel.

Of the old roads of the Continent during the Dark and Middle Ages, we have little to record. The central energy of Rome had suffered collapse. Europe was partitioned into feeble kingdoms and powerful fiefs. War was the normal condition of its provinces; the sports of the field were unfavourable to agriculture, and directly opposed to the promotion of commerce and the growth of towns. So long as it was conducive to the pleasures of the manorial lord to keep large tracts of land uncultivated, it was contrary to his interests to form great thoroughfares. We have in the ‘Tesoretto’ of Brunetto a striking picture of the desolation of northern Spain in the thirteenth century. He thus describes his journey over the plain of Roncesvalles.

“There a scholar I espied,On a bay mule that did ride.Well away! what fearful groundIn that savage part I found.If of art I aught could ken,Well behoved me use it then.More I look’d, the more I deem’dThat it wild and desert seem’d:Not a road was there in sight;Not a house and not a wight;Not a bird and not a brute,Not a rill, and not a root;Not an emmet, not a fly,Not a thing I mote descry:Sore I doubted therewithalWhether death would me befall.Nor was wonder, for aroundFull three hundred miles of ground,Right across on every sideLay the desert bare and wide.”[87]

As Ser Brunetto was despatched on very urgent business, it may be presumed that he was journeying by the most direct road which he could find. Until the reign of Charlemagne indeed there were but few towns, and consequently few roads, in Germany. The population generally was widely spread over the surface of the land. “A house, with its stables and farm-buildings,” says Mr. Hallam, “surrounded by a hedge or inclosure, was called a court, or as we find it in our law-books, a curtilage: the toft or homestead of a more genuine English dialect. One of these, with the adjacent arable fields and woods, had the name of a villa or manse. Several manses composed a march; and several marches formed a Pagus, or district.” There was indeed little temptation or need to move from place to place, when nearlyevery article of consumption was produced or wrought at home. For several centuries there is perhaps not a vestige to be discovered of any considerable manufacture. Each district furnished for itself its own articles of common utility. Rich men kept domestic artizans among their servants; even kings, in the ninth century, had their clothes made by the women upon their farms. The weaver, the smith, and the currier were often born and bred on the estate where they pursued their several crafts.

The position of Rome as the ecclesiastical metropolis of the world caused both a general and periodical recourse of embassies, deputations, pilgrims, and travellers to the Italian peninsula, yet we cannot discover that any especial conveniences were provided for the wayfarers. Even in the great and solemn years of the Jubilee the roads were merely patched up, and the bridges temporarily repaired by the Roman government, and only in such places as had become actually impassable. The floating capital of the more commercial of the Italian Republics was employed rather upon their docks and arsenals than upon their roads and causeways. Venice indeed, which for central vigour was the most genuine offspring of Imperial Rome, paved its continental possessions with broad thoroughfares. But neither Padua, Ravenna, nor Florence followed the example of the Adriatic Queen. On the contrary, Dante, when in his descentto Hell he meets with any peculiarly difficult or precipitous track, frequently compares it to some road well known to his countrymen, which fallen rocks had blocked up, or a wintry flood had rendered impermeable. Spain presented, as it presents at this day, to the engineer, almost insurmountable difficulties. The Moorish provinces of the south alone possessed any tolerable roads; nor were the ways of Arragon or Castile mended after the wealth of Mexico and Peru had been poured into the Spanish exchequer. Portugal owed its first good roads in modern times to its good king Emmanuel; and the Dutch and Flemings, the most commercial people of Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, found in their rivers and canals an easier transit than roads would have afforded them, for the wares which they brought from Archangel on the one hand and from the Spice Islands on the other. The military restlessness of France indeed led to the earlier formation of great roads. Yet France was a land long divided in itself; and the Duchies of Burgundy and Bretagne had little in common with the enterprising spirit of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. Upon the whole the roads of England, bad as they were, were at least upon a par with those of the Continent.

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