"_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 n.o.bly 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 she came 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, Cheshire cheese, 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-gla.s.s."
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 Boniface of 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 to the 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.
Pa.s.sengers who had any value for their lives and limbs, when they booked themselves at London for Exeter or York, provided themselves with cutla.s.ses 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 a _couteau de cha.s.se_ slung 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 Common on 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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. Fast horse-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 pet.i.tions to the length of the ascent. {56} The old soldier in "Gil Blas" stood by the wayside with a carbine laid across two sticks, and solicited, or rather enforced, the alms of the pa.s.ser-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 st.u.r.dy 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 an _obolus_, to be flung from its window. A few of the craft indeed linger in bye-roads and infest our villages and streets; but _ichabod_!-its glory 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 similar irregularity 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 va.s.sals 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 pa.s.sengers. The better or worse accommodation of the roadside inns was taken into account; and it was "mine host"s" interest to furnish good ale and beef, since he was tolerably certain that, with such attractions within-doors, the populous and heavy-laden mail would not pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sengers to resume their places.
Hence the great caution observable in the newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts of coach-travelling. We have now before us an announcement of the kind, dated in the year 1751. It sets forth that, G.o.d 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 Sat.u.r.day, "as shall seem good" to the majority of the pa.s.sengers. 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, except when the coach overturned or was stuck in the mud.
Direction-posts in the seventeenth century were almost unknown. Th.o.r.esby 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce of eighteen miles a traveller pa.s.sed 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 of him a serving maid, with additional bandboxes, _et divers effets de sa maitresse_. 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 next Nangis, 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 Chatelet 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 disenc.u.mber 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.blemen 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 the accompanying 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 n.o.bility 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 hors.e.m.e.n.
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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.size-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 inst.i.tute 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 manufactured or 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 pa.s.sed 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 deep and 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 circ.u.mstance that his sister and sole surviving relative dwelt beside one of the great 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 mora.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstance 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 a Lusitanian 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 princ.i.p.al 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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.sed, 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 the ma.s.sacre 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 owing to 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 c.u.mberland"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; the hire 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 pa.s.sed 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 of _la haute n.o.blesse_. 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 of these exquisite centaurs, as he rode beside the royal carriage near Versailles. "Oui, Sire, a l"Anglaise," rejoined the self-satisfied dandy, understanding his majesty to have complimented his _trotting_ (_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 pa.s.sing 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 government official 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 c.o.c.k of the hat and the most approved method of wielding a cane. He was an oral "Belle a.s.semblee." 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 stomachers For 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 the _dramatis personae_ of rural life the pedlar was, at even a recent period, in the northern counties of England, may be 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