ing's ride.
The same circumstances occurred in this country. When coaches began to be
kept by the gentry, or were hired out, a powerful party found their
"occupation gone!" Ladies would no longer ride on pillions behind their
footmen, nor would take the air, where the air was purest, on the river.
Judges and counsellors from their inns would no longer be conveyed by
water to Westminster Hall, or jog on with all their gravity on a poor
palfrey. Considerable bodies of men were thrown out of their habitual
employments--the watermen, the hackneymen, and the saddlers. Families
were now jolted, in a heavy wooden machine, into splendour and ruin. The
disturbance and opposition these coaches created we should hardly now have
known, had not Taylor, the Water-poet[A] and man, sent down to us an
invective against coaches, in 1623, dedicated to all who are grieved with
"the world running on wheels."

[Footnote A: Taylor was originally a Thames waterman, hence the term
"Water-poet" given him. His attack upon coaches was published with this
quaint title, "The world runnes on wheeles, or, odds, betwixt carts and
coaches." It is an unsparing satire.--Ed.]

Taylor, a humorist and satirist, as well as waterman, conveys some
information in this rare tract of the period when coaches began to be more
generally used--"Within our memories our nobility and gentry could ride
well-mounted, and sometimes walk on foot gallantly attended with fourscore
brave fellows in blue coats, which was a glory to our nation far greater
than forty of these leathern timbrels. Then the name of a _coach_ was
heathen Greek. Who ever saw, but upon extraordinary occasions, Sir Philip
Sidney and Sir Francis Drake ride in a coach? They made small use of
coaches; there were but few in those times, and they were deadly foes to
sloth and effeminacy. It is in the memory of many when in the whole
kingdom there was not one! It is a doubtful question whether the devil
brought _tobacco_ into England in _a coach_, for both appeared at the same
time." It appears that families, for the sake of their exterior show,
miserably contracted their domestic establishment; for Taylor, the
Water-poet, complains that when they used formerly to keep from ten to a
hundred proper serving-men, they now made the best shift, and for the sake
of their coach and horses had only "a butterfly page, a trotting footman,
and a stiff-drinking coachman, a cook, a clerk, a steward, and a butler,
which hat