540 



The Book of the Horse. 



while nearly as expensive, were much less difficult to produce in perfection, and infinitely less 

 dangerous. 



The most original curricle of the last century, built at the order of that caricature of a 

 dandy, Romeo Coates, was of copper, in the shape of a nautilus shell. 



The first carriage set up by Charles Dickens, after he awoke one morning and found 

 himself famous, was a curricle. It was in a curricle that he drove to pay his first visit 

 to the young and rising artist, the painter of " Dolly Varden," since a Royal Academician, 

 W. P. Frith. A curricle is one of" the "properties" in the story of "Nicholas Nickleby." 



Count d'Orsay was the last dandy who drove a curricle in the Park, and sent this 

 costly, magnificent carriage out of fashion, when he took up the cabriolet, as Whyte Mel- 

 ville says, " with his whiskers and his cabriolet horse, he took the town by storm." 



THE CURRICLE. 



It was somewhere about 1846 that I saw the great Duke of Wellington driving himself 

 in a sulphur-yellow curricle, with silver harness and bar, over old Westminster Bridge, to take 

 part in a review at Woolwich ; the late bridge was very steep, and he walked his horses 

 up the ascent from Westminster. 



THE CABRIOLET. 



The cabriolet — which is still a favourite with a select few rich Guardsmen, fast stock- 

 jobbers, and the survivors of the last generation of men about town, solely for Park use, 

 and was the height of fashion in the early days of Queen Victoria's reign— is a curricle with 

 a pair of shafts, and without the groom's rumble. Mrs. Gore, in one of her novels, makes 

 it the carriage of a married couple of rank and limited fortune. That was before the in- 

 vention of the one-horse brougham. It took the place for men not only of the curricle and the 

 stanhope gig, but of the chariot and the i<is-d-vis, for every use except Court drawing- 

 rooms. Palace Yard was full of cabriolets on the night of 1835, when Lord John Russell 



