192 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



tration had discovered, and repairing there in a coach and 

 four, driven by his own royal hands, at the rate of fifty- 

 six round miles in four hours and a half. 



Indeed it seems to me that the Brighton Road might 

 almost be called the Regent's Road. For where without 

 the Regent would its terminus have been ? Why, it 

 would have been nowhere ; or it might have been at St. 

 Leonards, Eastbourne, or anywhere else. When once 

 however the Regent has discovered that the air of Brighton 

 tended to benefit his health, he made a centre of fashion 

 out of a small health-resort, almost before he had time to 

 finish the Pavilion ; and one of the finest of the coaching 

 roads of England out of an uncertain track, often im- 

 passable. 



For before the Pavilion was, Brighton was about as 

 easy to get at as Cranmere Pool in the middle of Dart- 

 moor, the moon, the North Pole, the special exits in case 

 of fire at our principal theatres, or anything else on earth 

 totally inaccessible. When in 1750 the genial Doctor 

 Russell, of Lewes, found himself better for a trip to the 

 small fishing village, and induced some of his fair 

 hypochondriacs to go there too ; how they were to get 

 there, considering the state of the roads — if they could 

 be called roads — was the conundrum which they gener- 

 ally proposed. And I have no doubt that Doctor 

 Russell of Lewes prescribed oxen as a means of transit ; 

 for oxen were about the only beasts of burden which 

 could cope, at the time I speak of, with the country's 

 wickedly deep ruts. People got into coaches to go to 

 Brighton and only got out of them when they were 

 overturned. Princes on Royal progresses sat fourteen 

 hours at a stretch in state carriages, without being 

 able to get an atom of refreshment into their royal jaws. 

 In 1749 Horace W^alpole cursed the curiosity which had 

 tempted him to tour in a country in which he found neither 

 road, conveniences, inns, postillions, nor horses ! What 

 didhe find in Sussex ? one is tempted to ask. Why, he 

 found that " the whole country had a Saxon air" (which 



