( IIAI-. I. OLD ROADS. L63 



;i slmiL>-li of extraordinary miryness, it used to be called 

 " the Sussex bit of the road ;" and he satirically alleged 

 lli; it the reason why the Sussex girls were so long- 

 limbed was because of the tenacity of the mud in that 

 county ; the practice of pulling the foot out of it " by 

 the strength of the ancle " tending to stretch the muscle 

 and lengthen the bone ! * 



But the roads in the immediate neighbourhood of 

 London seem to have been almost as bad as those in Sussex. 

 Tims, when the poet Cowley retired to Chertsey, in 1665, 

 lie wrote to his friend Sprat to visit him, and, by way 

 of encouragement, told him that he might sleep the first 

 night at Hampton town ; thus occupying two days in 

 tin- performance of a journey of twenty-two miles in the 

 immediate neighbourhood of the metropolis. As late 

 as 1736 we find Lord Hervey, writing from Kensington, 

 complaining that " the road between this place and 

 London is grown so infamously bad that we live here 

 in the same solitude as we would do if cast on a rock 

 in the middle of the ocean; and all the Londoners tell 

 us that there is between them and us an impassable 

 gulf of mud." The mud was no respecter of persons, 

 either ; for we are informed that the carriage of Queen 

 Caroline could not, in bad weather, be dragged from 

 St. James's Palace to Kensington in less than two hours, 

 and occasionally the royal coach stuck fast in a rut, or 

 \\;is even overthrown into the mud. The streets of 

 London themselves were no better at that time, the 

 kennel being still permitted to flow in the middle of the 

 street, which was paved with round stones, flagstones 

 for the pedestrians being as yet unknown. 



* Her Sussexiense? By Dr. John Burton. 



M 2 



