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That they had no springs, is clear enough from the statement of Taylor, the water-poet who deplored the introduction of carriages as a national calamity that in the paved streets of London men and women were "tossed, tumbled, rumbled, and jumbled about in them."
The language betrays, as in the case of the author's eclogues, a pseudo-archaism, which points, particularly in such phrases as 'doe ycleape, to a perhaps unfortunate study of Spenser. Occasionally we meet with topical allusions, for instance the thrust at Taylor put into the mouth of the rude Cancrone: Farewell ye rockes and seas, I thinke yee'l shew it That Sicelie affords a water-Poet.
The last statement is interestingly corroborated by the account which Taylor the Water-Poet printed in 1618 of his journey to Scotland, and which he termed his "Penniless Pilgrimage or Moneyless Perambulation," in the course of which he purports to have depended entirely on private hospitality. A friend says: "The Scotch were long very poor. Only their fish, oatmeal, and whiskey kept them alive.
Many people say this and that about a queen and a king, but I think a king comes more natural to us English folks; and this good gentleman goes as often down by water to Greenwich, and employs as many of the barge-men and water-men of all kinds; and maintains, in his royal grace, John Taylor, the water-poet, who keeps both a sculler and a pair of oars.
The Water-poet, were he now living, might have acknowledged that if, in the changes of time, some trades disappear, other trades rise up, and in an exchange of modes of industry the nation loses nothing. The hands which, like Taylor's, rowed boats, came to drive coaches. These complainers on all novelties, unawares always answer themselves.
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 hath forced an army of tall fellows to the gatehouses," or prisons.
That the fops of Charles I.'s reign were spending money on a fashion originally set by King Henry the Bluff, was the opinion also of Taylor the Water Poet, who in 1630 wrote In regarding the falling-band as the germ of the ruff, the Water-Poet differs from those writers who, with greater appearance of reason, maintain that the ruff was the parent of the band.
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