THE BATH ROAD 3 



Coaching Age ; Coaching and Anecdotes of the Road; A 

 Drive through England, &c, &c), purely from the coach- 

 man's point of view ; and then I shall look at it from the 

 point of view of Miss Burney and Mr. Samuel Pepys. 

 With kindred assistance I shall try to get some glimpses 

 of the social life which passed to and fro between 

 London and the provinces from the time when men 

 began to travel, up to the time when they began to 

 arrive at places, but to travel no more. I shall show our 

 ancestors of all ages in all kinds of costumes — trunk 

 hose, doublet and ruffles, sacks and sarcinets, periwigs 

 and full-bottomed coats, beavers and top-boots, busy 

 at those nothings which make travelled life — eating, 

 drinking, flirting, quarrelling, delivering up their purses, 

 grumbling over their bills — a motley crowd of kings, 

 queens, statesmen, highwaymen, generals, poets, wits, 

 fine ladies, conspirators, and coachmen. With the 

 assistance of my able illustrators, I shall picture these 

 worthies in all sorts of positions — on the road and ofT it, 

 snowed up, in peril from the great waters, waiting for 

 the stage coaches, &c, alighting at the inns — those inns 

 for which England was once famous, with their broad 

 corridors, their snug bars, their four-posted beds hung 

 with silk, their sheets smelling of lavender, their choice 

 cookery, their claret equal to the best that could be 

 drunk in London. Here too I shall hope now and 

 again to make the violet of a legend blow among the 

 chops and steaks ; and besides mere chance travellers, 

 to call upon some ghostly and romantic figures who 

 lived near the road when in the flesh, whose residence 

 by it seems to make them of it, and must have caused 

 them many a time to post up and down it on business 

 or pleasure bent, before grim Fate sent them posting to 

 Hades. 



Any time between the years 1667 and 1670 the issue 

 of some such announcement as the following made 

 Londoners stare : — 



B 2 



