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Updated: May 23, 2025
Mail-coaches and chaises were the only vehicles then in requisition, with the exception of the awkward gingles, buggies, and other gear of that nondescript class which were peculiar to the times, and principally confined to the metropolis.
There was a man in the last century, and an eminent man too, who used to say, that whereas people in general pretended to admire astronomy as being essentially sublime, he for his part looked upon all that sort of thing as a swindle; and, on the contrary, he regarded the solar system as decidedly vulgar; because the planets were all of them so infernally punctual, they kept time with such horrible precision, that they forced him, whether he would or no, to think of nothing but post- office clocks, mail-coaches, and book-keepers.
Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or dais, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law that the three delf fellows, after all, were not present. Such being, at that time, the usage of mail-coaches, what was to be done by us of young Oxford?
"I will endeavour to give him a look capable of action and energy," he said; "but he must be contemplative, grave, simple. He is a good subject. I wish to make him look like an Archimedes." If Gibson admired Stephenson, however, he did not wholly admire Stephenson's railways. The England he had left was the England of mail-coaches.
The mail-coaches it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which they had been sown.
They profited, so it was said, by the great number of 'refractories, the name applied to those who evaded the conscription, which was at that time, as you probably know, enforced to actual abuse. This name applies to royalists who robbed the mail-coaches conveying government funds, and levied tribute on those who bought the confiscated property of emigres at the West.
Bryond pushed Rifoel to crime; he instigated the attacks of armed men upon the mail-coaches bearing the moneys of the government, and the levying of a heavy tribute from the purchasers of the National domain; a tax he enforced by means of tortures invented by him which carried terror through five departments.
The island rang as yet with the tooting horns and rattling teams of mail-coaches; a gay sight was the road in merry England in those days, before steam-engines arose and flung its hostelry and chivalry over.
When Palmer's new mail-coaches were introduced, an attempt was made to diminish the jolting of the passengers by having the carriages hung upon new patent springs, but with very indifferent results. Mathew Boulton, the engineer, thus described their effect upon himself in a journey he made in one of them from London into Devonshire, in 1787:
The mail-coaches were then to be stopt, as a signal to their adherents in the country that the insurrection had triumphed in the metropolis. An assault was then to be made on the Tower, and the arms seized.
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