THE ROAD. 
handsome coach-horses, fit for London, and well broken 
and bitted, cannot be purchased under two hundred 
guineas ; and even job-masters often give much more 
for them to let out to their customers. In harness, also, 
we think we have arrived at perfection, to which the 
invention of the patent shining leather has mainly con- 
tributed. A handsome horse, well harnessed, is a noble 
sight; and is it not extraordinary that in no country 
but England is the art of putting horses into harness 
generally understood ? Independently of the workman- 
ship of the harness-maker, if our road-horses were put 
to their coaches in the loose awkward fashion of the 
Continent, we could never travel at the rate we do. It 
is the command given over the coach-horse that alone 
enables us to do it. 
We may as well say a word or two as to private 
vehicles ere we close. As a fac-simile of the gentle- 
man's family-coach of fifty years back is now become 
difficult to produce, we will describe it. It had a most 
comfortable and roomy body, quite fit to contain six 
portly persons, and suspended by long leather braces, 
affixed to nearly upright springs. To enable the body 
to hang low, the perch of a bent form, called the com- 
pass perch, was used ; and the carriage was of great 
length and strength. In fact it was, coachman and all, 
in strict accordance with the animals that drew it, and 
came under the denomination of " slow and easy." The 
fashionable open carriage of this day was a still more 
unsightly object the high, single-bodied phaeton, all 
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