h forced an army of tall fellows to the gatehouses," or prisons.
Of one of the evil effects of this new fashion of coach-riding this
satirist of the town wittily observes, that, as soon as a man was
knighted, his lady was lamed for ever, and could not on any account be
seen but in a coach. As hitherto our females had been accustomed to robust
exercise, on foot or on horseback, they were now forced to substitute a
domestic artificial exercise in sawing billets, swinging, or rolling the
great roller in the alleys of their garden. In the change of this new
fashion they found out the inconvenience of a sedentary life passed in
their coaches.[A]

[Footnote A: Stow, in his "Chronicles," has preserved the date of the
first introduction of coaches into England, as well as the name of the
first driver, and first English coachmaker. "In the year 1564 Guilliam
Boonen, a Dutchman, became the queen's coachman, and was the first that
brought the use of coaches into England. After a while divers great
ladies, with as great jealousie of the queen's displeasure, made them
coaches, and rid in them up and down the country, to the great admiration
of all the beholders; but then, by little and little, they grew usual
among the nobility and others of sorte, and within twenty years became a
great trade of coachmaking;" and he also notes that in the year of their
introduction to England "Walter Rippon made a _coche_ for the Earl of
Rutland, which was the first _coche_ that was ever made in England."--ED.]

Even at this early period of the introduction of coaches, they were not
only costly in the ornaments--in velvets, damasks, taffetas, silver and
gold lace, fringes of all sorts--but their greatest pains were in matching
their coach-horses. "They must be all of a colour, longitude, latitude,
cressitude, height, length, thickness, breadth (I muse they do not weigh
them in a pair of balances); and when once matched with a great deal of
care, if one of them chance to die, then is the coach maimed till a meet
mate be found, whose corresponding may be as equivalent to the surviving
palfrey, in all respects, as like as a broom to a besom, barm to yeast, or
codlings to boiled apples." This is good natural humour. He proceeds
--"They use more diligence in matching their coach-horses than in the
marriage of their sons and daughters." A great fashion, in its novelty, is
often extravagant; true elegance and utility are never at first combined;
good sense