THE BATH ROAD 65 



not only fatal to romance, but is fatal to any collection 

 of it, if any romance at any period existed ; and some 

 sort of prophetic insight into this truth, a sort of sad per- 

 ception of what posterity, by its rejection of stage coaches, 

 would be eternally bereft, breathes through the following 

 threnody of a great coachman, whose poetic heart could 

 not remain silent under the introduction of the new gods, 

 but whose name, as Keats supposed his to be, is writ in 

 water, or perhaps in rum and water, which would in this 

 case be a fitter emblem of effacement. 



" Them," he cries, with a fine directness of pathos, 

 " them as 'ave seen coaches afore rails came into fashion 

 'ave seen something worth remembering ! Them was 

 'appy days for old England, afore reform and rails turned 

 everything upside down, and men rode, as nature intended 

 they should, on pikes, with coaches and smart active 

 cattle, and not by machinery like bags of cotton and 

 hardware. But coaches is done for ever, and a heavy 

 blow it is ! They was the pride of the country ; there 

 wasn't anything like them, as I've 'eerd gemmen say 

 from forrin parts, to be found nowhere, nor never will 

 again." 



To descend from these high regions of prophecy and 

 metaphor to firm earth again, the Bath Road, after leaving 

 Shepherd's Shore, runs through a district whose in- 

 habitants must have been regarded by the drivers of Mr. 

 Thomas Cooper's coaches between London and Bath 

 with appreciative eyes ; for the Wiltshire men resident 

 between Shepherd's Shore and Devizes have been 

 notorious through all ages for being " very fine and 

 large," as were Mr. Thomas Cooper's coachmen. The 

 inhabitants, indeed, of Bishop's Canning, a village about 

 three miles from Devizes, might, in the seventeenth 

 century, according to Aubrey, have challenged all 

 England to the exquisitely diversive exercises of music 

 and football. In James the First's time the village 

 boasted a peculiarly musical vicar, one George Ferraby, 

 who I trust played football as well as he played the lute, 



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