THE ROAD. 
he never was in his life, and displays him in his 
brightest colours. We father our sins, then, upon the 
Patavinian. 
But we will now adhere to sober prose, and the 
changes of our own time. Thirty years ago, the Holy- 
head mail left London, via Oxford, at eight o'clock at 
night, and arrived in Shrewsbury between ten and 
eleven the following night, being twenty-seven hours to 
one hundred and sixty- two miles. This distance is now 
done, without the least difficulty, in sixteen hours and a 
quarter; and the Holyhead mail is actually at Bangor 
Ferry, eighty-three miles further, in the same time it 
used to take in reaching the post-office at Shrewsbury. 
We fancy'we now see it, as it was when we travelled on 
it in our school-boy time, over the Wolverhampton and 
Shiffnal stage in those days loose uncovered sand in 
part with Charles Peters or old Ebden quitting his 
seat as guard, and coming to the assitance of the coach- 
man, who had flogged his horses till he could flog them 
no longer. We think we see them crawling up the hill 
in Shrewsbury town whip, whip, whip ; and an hour 
behind their time "by Shrewsbury clock;" the betting 
not ten to one that she had not been overturned on 
the road ! It is now a treat to see her approach the 
town, if not before, never after, her minute: and she 
forms a splendid day-coach through Wales and England, 
on her up-journey in the summer ; namely, from Holy- 
head to Daventry. A young man of the name of 
Taylor, a spirited proprietor, horses her through Shrews- 
