168 EARLY MODES OF CONVEYANCE. PAKT III. 



mode of travelling until late in the eighteenth century ; 

 and Hogarth's picture illustrating the practice will be 

 remembered, of the cassocked parson on his lean horse, 

 attending his daughter newly alighted from the York 

 waggon. 



The introduction of stage-coaches about the middle of 

 the seventeenth century formed a new era in the history 

 of travelling by road. At first they were only a better 

 sort of waggon, and confined to the more practicable 

 highways near London. Their pace did not exceed four 

 miles an hour, and the jolting of the unfortunate pas- 

 sengers conveyed in them must have been very hard to 

 bear. It used to be said of their drivers that they were 

 " seldom sober, never civil, and always late." The first 

 mention of coaches for public accommodation is made by 

 Sir William Dugdale in his Diary, from which it appears 

 that a Coventry coach was on the road in 1659. But 

 probably the first coaches, or rather waggons, were run 

 between London and Dover, as one of the most prac- 

 ticable routes for the purpose. M. Sobriere, a French 

 man of letters, who landed at Dover on his way to 

 London in the time of Charles II., alludes to the exist- 

 ence of a stage-coach, but it seems to have had no charms 

 for him, as the following passage will show : " That I 

 might not," he says, " take post or be obliged to use the 

 stage-coach, I went from Dover to London in a waggon. 

 I was drawn by six horses, one before another, and 

 driven by a waggoner, who walked by the side of it. 

 He was clothed in black, and appointed in all things 

 like another St. George. He had a brave monteror on 

 his head and was a merry fellow, fancied he made a 

 figure, and seemed mightily pleased with himself." 



Shortly after, coaches seem to have been running 

 as far north as Preston in Lancashire, as appears by a 

 letter from one Edward Parker to his father, dated 

 November, 1663, 1 in which he says, "I got to London 



1 Paper in ' Archaiologia,' quoted above. 



