82 STAGECOAC/J AND MAIL IN DAYS OF YORE 



Although we have no earlier information of this 

 coach, it is prohably safe to assume that this, like 

 the advertisement of the York coach already 

 quoted, merely advertised the heginning of a new 

 season, and that winter was still largely, as it had 

 been seventy-six years hefore, a blank in the 

 coaching world. Rothwell was evidently estab- 

 lished at Warwick, and seems to have been the 

 first notable coach-proprietor, the forerunner of 

 the Chaplins, Nelsons, Mountains, Shermans and 

 Ibbersons of a later age. By his old advertise- 

 ment we see that he catered for all classes of 

 travellers — by stage-coach, private carriage, chaise, 

 and waggon — and that he hired out horses to the 

 gentlemen who still preferred their own company 

 and the saddle to the coach and its miscellaneous 

 strangers. Even the dead were not beyond the 

 consideration of Mr. Rothwell, whose " Hearse, 

 with Mourning Coach and Able Horses," is set 

 forth to "go to any part of Great Britain, at 

 reasonable Bates." Unhappily for the historian 

 eager to reconstruct the road life of those times, 

 this old advertisement is almost all that survives 

 to tell us of Rothwell, and fortunate avc are to 

 have even that, for such sheets, as commonplace 

 when issued as the advertisements of railway 

 excursions are at the present time, are now of 

 extreme rarity. It would appear, from the rude 

 woodcut illustrating Rothwell's bill, that his 

 coach was of the old type, hung on leather straps 

 and quite innocent of springs — the kind of coach 

 that Parson Adams, in Melding's Joseph Andrews, 



