refreshment. The consequence is that
hundreds of excellent inns have fallen into decay. In a short time
no good houses of that description will be found, except at places
where strangers are likely to be detained by business or pleasure."

Highwaymen, pedlars, inns, coachmen, and well-appointed coaches have now
nearly vanished from our roads. Some of the more excellent breeds of
English horses have gone with them, or will soon follow them. In another
generation no one will survive who has seen a Norfolk hackney. This race
of sure-footed indefatigable trotters has already become so few in number
that "a child may count them." "The oldest inhabitant"--that universal
referee with some persons on all disputed points--never set eye on a
genuine Flemish coach-horse in England; and the gallant high-stepping
hybrid--half thoroughbred, half hackney--which whirled along the fast
coaches at the rate of twelve miles in the hour will in a few years be
nowhere found. The art of 'putting to' four horses in a few seconds will
become one of the 'artes deperditae;' and the science of driving so as to
divide equally the weight and the speed between the team, and to
apportion the strength of the cattle to the variations of the road, will
have become a tradition. Perfect as mechanism was the discipline of a
well-trained leader. He knew the road, and the duty expected of him.
Docile and towardly during his seven- or nine-mile stage, he refused to
perform more than his allotted task. Attached to his yoke-fellow, he
resented the intrusion of a stranger into his harness: and a mere change
of hands on the box would often convert the willing steed into a recusant
against the collar, whom neither soothing nor severity would induce to
budge a step. Some suffering indeed has been spared to the equine world
by the substitution of brass and iron for blood and sinews; but the
poetry of the road is gone with the _quadrigae_ that a few years ago
tripped lightly and proudly over the level of the Macadamized road. No
latter-day Homer will again indite such a verse as

"[Greek text]."

The Four-in-hand Club is extinct, or, with those ancient charioteers at
Troy, courses in Hades over meadows of asphodel.

Of the old roads of the Continent during the Dark and Middle Ages, we
have little to record. The central energy of Rome had suffered collapse.
Europe was partitioned into feeble kingdoms and powerful fiefs. War was
the nor