THE ROAD. 
sure, the report given us of Lord Londonderry's 
speaking in the House of Peers one night, and being at 
his own house in Durham the next (two hundred and 
fifty miles off), is astonishing, and was a performance 
that no other country under the sun could accomplish ; 
yet bribes to postillions and extra relays of horses might 
have been called in aid here. We shall, therefore, 
confine ourselves, at present, to the usual course of 
public conveyances ; and a sentence in the private 
letter of a personal friend of our own has suggested the 
subject to us. " I was out hunting," he writes, " last 
season, on a Monday, near Brighton ; and dined with 
my father in Merrion Square, Dublin, at six o'clock on 
the following Wednesday distance four hundred miles ! " 
It was done thus : he went from Brighton in an after- 
noon coach that set him down in London in time for the 
Holyhead mail ; and this mail, with the help of the 
steamer to cross the Channel, delivered him in Dublin 
at the time mentioned. But expedition alone is not our 
boast. Coach travelling is no longer a disgusting and 
tedious labour, but has long since been converted into 
comparative ease, and really approaches to something 
like luxury; otherwise it could never have had any 
chance to engage the smallest part of the attention of 
that genuine "Epicuri de grege porcus" the late 
happily-named Dr. Kitchener.* 
It is difficult to determine the exact period at which 
* Dr. Johnson boasted of having travelled from London to Salisbury in 
one day, by the common stage, " hung high and rough ! " 
