524 



The Book or the Horse. 



Park, or capacious and double for the happy pair with a full quiver. It is the warmest 

 carriage in winter, and is cool, with all the windows open, in summer. It requires no second 

 man-servant, although there is room beside the driving-groom for a page. It is equally 

 useful for shopping on the stones ; or, fitted with a luggage basket, as a conveyance in the 

 country, or to and from the railway station. In the Park, and at other assemblies of the 

 fashionable, the windows of a brougham are so " hung on the line " as to present a fair face 

 at the very best point of view for admiration and for conversation. For these reasons it is 

 worth while to make the chapter on the brougham the text for a brief sketch of the rise and 

 progress to perfection of English pleasure-carriages. 



The brougham, invented by the great and eccentric genius Lord Chancellor Brougham, 

 whose name it bears, was the consequence of his finding his coachman and footman not 



BROUGHAM. 



ready one day with a chariot and pair, after a series of nights of waiting for the poli- 

 tician, orator, author, and man of fashion. He asked his coachmaker for a close carriage, 

 which one man could manage and one horse could draw, not so ponderous as the pill- 

 box, the one-horse chariot of apothecaries, which was a standing subject for the jokes of wits 

 of the time of George III. The first attempts were very heavy affairs, more of the present 

 street-cab style than anything else ; but, when taken up by the fathers of the West-end trade, 

 they soon became, in spite of much ridicule, the rage. 



The brougham killed the cabriolet, just as the stanhope gig and the cabriolet killed the 

 curricle. The social results of this one-horse "carriage of gentility" have been immense. It 

 has become alike the carriage of the family party and of the solitary "swell," of the hard- 

 working professional man and of the "girl of the period." All conditions of men and women 

 avail themselves of it as a thing of utility and elegance. The brougham is the parent of the 

 four-wheeled cab, which, with all its faults, is an ininicnse improvement in comfort, con- 



