2 22 STAGE-COACH AND MAIL IN DAYS OF YORE 



such a thing as a fat postboy, it would he the very 

 height of rashness to say that a lean coachman 

 was unknown. There were many such, hut the 

 traditional coachman was a hulky person, helped 

 uj^ to his seat hy the combined efforts of the stable- 

 helpers ; and Dickens, in picturing Tony Weller, 

 fell in with the public humour, although already 

 the type was become somewhat out of date. 



The stage and mail coachmen Avere no exotics, 

 but, like every one else, the product of their 

 country and their times ; and as those times 

 changed, so did they. The evolution of the smart 

 coachmen of the 'thirties can be followed, step 

 by step, until progress, in the shape of railways, 

 extinguished the species. The original floggers of 

 six horses, who could only get along by dint of 

 severely punishing those unhappy animals through- 

 out the day, were not really coachmen in the later 

 sense. They understood little of the art of coach- 

 ing, and were merely drivers. From early morn 

 to sundown they lashed the same horses along 

 the rutted ways, with intervals for mending the 

 harness — generally, according to the testimony of 

 the time, the " rotten harness " ; but those would 

 have been wonderfully strong traces that could 

 long have withstood the strain they were subjected 

 to, and so they were probably not always so decayed 

 as contemporary accounts would have us believe. 

 Under these circumstances, and the generally hard 

 and rough life they led, it is not to be wondered at 

 that coachmen were originally a rough and brutal 

 class of men, They cannot be paralleled nowadaysi 



