CARRIAGES. 29 



puzzling, is the statement in ' Fyne Morrison's Itinerary,' pub- 

 lished the year after Visscher's engraving was issued, that 

 travellers in the south and west of England, in Scotland, and- 

 elsewhere, hired post horses at stations which were established 

 some ten miles from each other, and sometimes covered a dis- 

 tance between these post-houses at the rate of ten miles an 

 hour. These post-horses must have been ridden ; the coach 

 in the engraving would surely have taken nearly thrice the 

 time mentioned. 



Soon after this, about 1623, appeared the most desperate 

 onslaught on the coaches that has ever been published. John 

 Taylor, the 'Water Poet,' was the author of the attack a 

 pamphlet called ' The World runnes on Wheeles ; or, Oddes 

 betwixt Carts and Coaches' but it is to be feared that his 

 savage satire was based on the grievance which induced the 

 watermen to support the bill already mentioned, and of course 

 the Water Poet felt strongly on the subject. Carts he would 

 permit. Certain things had to be carried, no doubt, but as to 

 coaches, the reader is bidden to 'beware of a coach as you 

 would doe of a tyger, a wolfe, or a leuiathan.' There is not 

 space here even to hint at a tithe of the evils which the coach 

 was asserted to do, though the pleas on behalf of 'us poor water- 

 men' make the meaning of the assault plain enough. It is 

 odd, however, to read the catalogue of the dangers which are 

 declared to be brought about by coaches, and to compare it 

 with the sort of thing that was written about railway trains 

 when they were first introduced, to the detriment of coaches. 

 The reader is doubtless familiar with the picture there are 

 indeed more than one of the same subject which shows the 

 driver of a coach pointing to a train which has run off the line 

 and is toppling down an embankment. The coach was then 

 regarded as the safest of conveyances, but Taylor cries out 

 that ' the mischiefes that have bin done by them are not to be 

 numbred, as breaking of legges and armes, overthrowing downe 

 hilles, over bridges, running ouer children, lame and old people ; 

 as Henrie the Fourth of France (the father of the king that 



