CARRIAGES. 27 



To-morrow ye shall on hunting fare, 



And ride, my daughter, in a chare. 



It shall be covered with velvet red, 



And cloth of fine gold all about your head ; 



With damask white and azure blue, 



Well diaper'd with lilies new. 



A luxuriously appointed ' chare,' truly, though one would 

 suppose too delicately finished to be used for following the 

 hunt through the mire and slush of the country. The chare 

 may probably be taken as the rough and early form of the 

 vehicle which afterwards came to be known as the chariot. 



With all the decorations described by the poet, who we 

 may suppose had seen something like such a carriage, and 

 did not evolve it all out of his imagination, it must be assumed 

 that the ' chare ' was not open if it were, indeed, one shudders 

 at the thought of rain ; but it seems to be noted as a curiosity 

 that the carriage in which Frederick III. entered Frankfort in 

 1474 was closed. Probably in days long before umbrellas 

 were thought of, our ancestors did not mind the wet, though, to 

 provide a shelter for a carriage, a cover or awning of some 

 kind or other cannot have been any severe tax on the inven- 

 tive powers of the early carriage- builders. 



Jumping again into the seventeenth century for, interesting 

 as are many of the records of primitive carriages, we must not 

 linger too long with so extensive a subject before us we find 

 that, partly because roads had a little improved, and partly 

 because the country was growing generally richer, wheeled 

 vehicles were becoming, or indeed had become, so common 

 that a bill was introduced to restrain the excessive use of 

 carriages. If with prophetic eye some man who read the bill 

 could have imagined what Hyde Park Corner would be like 

 on a June afternoon towards the end of the nineteenth century, 

 the result would have been amazing indeed. One would be 

 glad to know what Bacon thought of the bill, and whether it 

 was discussed by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher 

 Beaumont was too young to know anything of state policy in 



