1012] on The Road: Past, Pret^ent and Future. 331 



impassable at many places. The travellers then went aside, in fact 

 they were enjoined to do so by an old statnte, which declared that 

 " where any highway is worn deep, and incommodious, another shall 

 be laid out alongside." Thus the curving character of the road was 

 aggravated, and a state of things produced the very antithesis of the 

 old dii'ect firm permanent Roman way. The road was a quagmire full 

 of stones, which rolled about loose when fine weather dried it up. 



Of course, looking back over a long distance of time, it all seems 

 highly picturesque to the imagination. The illustrations in the 

 history books of our childhood showed us kings and queens making 

 journeys, and conveyed to us no idea of discomfort or hardship. A 

 Queen Elizabeth or a Queen Mary was represented as arriving at some 

 stately castle after a long day on the road, her velvet skirts without a 

 speck of dust or clot of mud besmirching their beauty. How diffe- 

 rent must the reality have been ! As regards driving, which was being 

 introduced in Elizabeth's time, we read of that Queen complaining to 

 the French ambassador that she had been " full of aching pains for 

 days," consequent upon a drive through London in a regal chariot, 

 which she was using for the first time. And it must have continued to 

 be much the same for many generations. We may set beside EUza- 

 beth's short drive through London Sydney Smith's humorous wail of 

 much later date, when he professed to know, as he said, " approximately " 

 the number of "severe contusions" he received on a journey from 

 Taunton to Bath, his figure being 10,000 to 12,000 jolts. These dis- 

 tresses were the consequence of road construction and maintenance 

 being left to the haphazard attention of each locality, instead of being 

 treated as a matter of general interest, calling for well thought-out 

 scientific treatment. Even when laws were passed, by which the in- 

 habitants of each locality were ordered to supply six days' labour on 

 the roads annually, the work was done on no system, was evaded by 

 many, was scamped shamefully, and the money provided by those who 

 commuted was squandered and often pilfered. A traveller's book of 

 1770 gives a graphic description of a main road at that time — that 

 from Preston to Wigan. 



" I know not, in the whole range of language, terms sufficiently 

 expressive to describe this infernal road ... let me most seriously 

 caution all travellers to avoid it as they would the devil ; for a 

 thousand to one but they break their necks or their lim1)s by over- 

 throws or breakings down. They will here meet with ruts which I 

 measured, four feet deep, and floating with mud. . . The only mending 

 it receives is the tumbling in of some loose stones, which serve no 

 other purpose but jolting a carriage most abominably. . . I actually 

 passed three carts broken down in these eighteen miles of execrable 

 memory." 



This is a tale of mud. Sheridan, in " The Rivals," gives us the 

 tale of dust, when he makes Bob Acres shout on his arrival at Bath : — 



" Warm work on the road, Jack — Odds whips and wheels ! I've 



