CHAPTER X 



THE LATER COACHMEN 



The smart coachmen came into existence with 

 short stages and the fast day-coaches, about 182 i. 

 They did not burst suddenly upon an astonished 

 workl — were not, like those insect-wonders, 

 chrysalids in the morning and butterflies in the 

 afternoon — but developed by insensible degrees. 

 The first incentive to this improvement was, 

 doubtless, that acquaintance with the moneyed 

 sporting world which began when the country 

 gentlemen ceased to travel horseback and took 

 to going by coach, and thence, from passive 

 l^assengers, developed an interest in driving ; 

 sitting beside the coachman and learning from 

 him something of what those worthies now, for 

 the first time in their lives, began dimly to perceive 

 was an art, and not merely an ordinary wage- 

 earning occupation. When Jack Bailey, of the 

 old " Prince of Wales," who taught old John 

 Warde, the first of the amateurs, how to drive, 

 tutored him, he wrought a greater revolution than 

 he knew. Acquaintance with, and tutorship of, 

 the growing ranks of the amateurs brought a 

 strange alteration in themselves. They taught 

 the young sprigs of nobility coaching, and their 



