HO IV THE COACH PASSENGERS FARED 351 



Barnet, Hounslow, and other stages near London 

 in the coaching age. 



Here at least — for there are twelve passengers 

 present — the insides and the outsides have fore- 

 gathered, and for once the gnlf socially dividing 

 them has heen bridged. This generally impassable 

 gnlf was more marked in the case of the mails 

 than in that of the stage-coaches. The very 

 superior and exclusive travellers who w^ent in 

 their OAvn chariots or by post-chaise resorted to 

 well-known hotels and posting-houses on the 

 roads, whose chaste halls were never profaned by 

 coaches. Even the sujierior j^ersons who travelled 

 inside the mails could not hope to Avin to those 

 expensive and select abiding-places ; but they 

 formed a caste by themselves, who never willingly 

 sat at meat with the outsides. De Quincey, who 

 often travelled outside, experienced something of 

 this contempt, and the recollection seems to have 

 lent eloquence to his remarks on the subject. It 

 was, he tells us, "The fixed assumption of the four 

 inside people that they, the illustrious quaternion, 

 constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, 

 whose dignity would have been compromised by 

 exchanging one word of civility with the three 

 miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have 

 kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint 

 the foot concerned in that operation, so that 

 perhaps it would have required an Act of Parlia- 

 ment to restore its purity of blood. What words, 

 then, could express the horror and the sense of 

 treason in that case, which had happened, where 



