86 THE COACHING ERA 



mails, they would make a bold and probably successful 

 bid for popularity. 



In this supposition they were correft, and so great was 

 the rivalry and emulation, not only between the stages 

 and mails but among the different coaching yards, that 

 in consequence everything connedled with coaching 

 was brought to the highest state of perfeftion. 



"Nimrod," the celebrated sporting writer, contri- 

 buted an article to the Quarterly Review for 1832, in 

 which he eulogized the improvements in coaching, 

 saying: "The fairy petted princes of The Arabian 

 Nights^ Entertainments were scarcely transported from 

 place to place with more facility or despatch, than 

 Englishmen are in a.d. 1832. From Liverpool to Man- 

 chester, thirty-six miles in an hour and a half! Surely 

 Daedalus is come amongst us again." 



To instance some of the great advances, he then gives 

 the supposititious case of an old gentleman falling asleep 

 in 1742 and waking up suddenly in Piccadilly in 1832, 

 desirous of returning to his home at Exeter. Just then 

 up drives the Comet with its team of greys. 



"You must be quick as lightning," says a loafer stand- 

 ing by, and though the old gentleman declares the 

 Comet is no stage-coach, but a private drag, he is shoved 

 into it, "having been three times assured that his luggage 

 is in the hind boot, and twice three times denied having 

 ocular demonstration of the fadf." He mistakes the 

 coachman for a gentleman and, when he has been cor- 

 rected, proceeds to expose his ignorance on other coach- 

 ing matters. 



