316 DRIVING. 



on dark and stormy nights, amidst hail and snow and rain, 

 apparently with as great facility as on a fine bright day. 

 Remember that the carriages were large, roomy and heavy, 

 and twice as long between the wheels as a coach, loaded 

 \\ ith many people and much heavy baggage. The only thing 

 I do think dangerous in riding and driving is to put four 

 horses and two postboys to a coach what we call a coach. It 

 is so much shorter than the old gentleman's coach or landau 

 that it is easily set swinging if horses gallop, and as the 

 wheel-boy would not feel the swinging, which a coachman 

 on the box does, they might easily swing it over. If it was 

 dangerous in those days, what would it be now when a good 

 postilion or postboy is more rare than the black swan of Virgil? 

 My belief is that the excellence of driving in those days arose 

 from the instruction the younger boys got when driving before 

 a good wheel-boy, and that the wretched, execrable driving of 

 gentlemen's coachmen and flymen in these days is attributable 

 to their beginning to drive alone, and always going alone, and 

 having no one to point out the faults they commit. Strange 

 it is that they all fall into the same bad way, the near rein in 

 the left hand, the off rein and the whip in the right, with results 

 as described in the Introduction. 



We have already mentioned that the posting-masters would 

 not keep a boy who did not drive well. Now they almost all 

 liked a drop of beer, and they made sufficient money to keep 

 their families respectable and comfortable, and had enough to 

 spare to indulge a little ; but it was seldom that a postboy was 

 seen in liquor. He either did not drink, or he could carry his 

 liquor, and drive as well when 'half seas over.' The danger 

 was if he had been overworked, and picked himself up with a 

 pot of beer on his return journey. In the number of miles the 

 writer has posted, he does not recollect more than three occa- 

 sions on which he could say a postboy was drunk, and one of 

 these three was only a few years ago, when posting was nearly 

 over, and no job was expected by the boys that day. It would 

 be twenty or more years since. A party were driving down to 



