Stage-coach and Mail in Days of Yore, Volume 1 (of 2)

Stage-coach and Mail in Days of Yore, Volume 1 (of 2) - A picturesque history of the coaching age

The lines quoted above are not remarkably good as poetry. Nay, it is possible to go farther, and to say that they are exceptionally badthe product of one of those corn-box poets who were accustomed to speak of steam as a demon foul; but if his lines are bad verse, the central idea is good. That man who first essayed to drive four-in-hand must indeed have been more than usually courageous. To form anything at all like an adequate idea of the Coaching Age, it is first necessary to discover how people travelled before that age dawned. As a picture is made by contrasted light and shade, so is the story of the coaching2 period only to be properly set forth by first narrating how journeys were made from place to place before the continuous history of wheeled traffic begins. That history, measured by mere count of years, is not a long one. It cannot, in its remotest origin, go back beyond the first appearance of the stage-waggon, about 1590, when the peasantry of this kingdom began to obtain an occasional lift on the roads, and sat among the goods which it was the first business of those waggons to carry. The peasant, then, was the first coach-passenger, for while he was carried thus, everyone else, in all the estates of the realm, from King and Queen down to the middle classes, rode horseback, and it was not until 1657 and the establishment of the Chester Stage that the Coaching Age opened for the public in general. If, then, we please to pronounce for that event as the true beginning, and allow 1848, the year when one of the last coaches, the Bedford Times, was withdrawn from the London and Bedford road in consequence of the opening of the Bletchley and Bedford branch railway, to be the end, we have the beginning, the growth and perfection of the old coaching era, and its final extinction, all comprised within a period of a hundred and ninety-one years. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 58667
Author: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Release Date: Jan 11, 2019
Format: eBook
Language: English