"Sure your fire, is not much more satisfactory: ancestors contrived your narrow streets in the days of wheel-barrows, before those greater engines, carts, were invented. Is your climate so hot that as you walk you need umbrellas of tiles to intercept the sun; or are your shambles so empty that you are afraid to take in fresh air, lest it should sharpen your stomachs? Oh, the goodly landskip of Old Fish Street! which, had it not had the ill luck to be crooked, was narrow enough to have been your founder's perspective: and where the garrets (perhaps not for want of architecture, but through abundance of amity), are so made, that opposite neighbours may shake hands without stirring from home." The chair had a better chance than the coach in such a state of affairs. In the pictures of coaches of the time of Elizabeth, the driver sits on a bar, or narrow chair, very low behind the horses. In those of Charles I. he sometimes drives in this way, and sometimes rides as a postillion. But the hackneycoachman after the Restoration is a personage with a short whip and spurs; he has been compelled to mount one of his horses, that he may more effectually manage his progress through the narrow streets. His coach, too, is a small affair. D'Avenant describes the coaches as "uneasily hung, and so narrow, that I took them for sedans on wheels." As the streets were widened, after the fire, the coachman was restored to the dignity of a seat on the carriage; for, in the times of William III. and VOL. II. C Anne, we invariably find him sitting on a box. This was a thing for use and not for finery. Here, or in a leather pouch appended to it, the careful man carried a hammer, pincers, nails, ropes, and other appliances in case of need; and the hammercloth was devised to conceal these necessary but unsightly remedies for broken wheels and shivered panels. The skill of this worthy artist in the way of reparation would not rust for want of use. Gay has left us two vivid pictures of the common accidents of the days of Anne. The carman was the terror of coaches from the first hour of their use; and whether he was the regular city carman, or bore the honour of the dustinan, brewer's man, or coal-heaver, he was ever the same vociferous and reckless enemy of the more aristocratic coachman. "I've seen a beau, in some ill-fated hour, When o'er the stones chok'd kennels swell the shower, In gilded chariot loll; he with disdain Views spatter'd passengers all drench'd in rain. With mud filled high, the rumbling cart draws near;- His ponderous spokes thy painted wheel engage; The dangers of opened vaults, and of mighty holes in the paving, fenced round with no protecting rail, and illuminated only by a glimmering rushlight in a dark street, seem to belong altoge ther to some barbaric region which never could have been London : "Where a dim gleam the paly lantern throws But long after Gay's time the carmen and the pavement made havoc with coaches. If we open Hogarth, the great painter of manners shows us the vehicular dangers of his age. Bonfires in the streets on rejoicing nights, with the "Flying coach," that went five miles an hour, overturned into the flames ;* the four lawyers getting out of a hackney-coach that has come in collision with a carman, while the brewer's man rides upon his shaft in somniferous majesty ;† the dustman's bell, the little boy's drum, the knife-grinder's wheel, all in the middle of the street, to the terror of horses; these representations exhibit the perils that assailed the man who ventured into a coach. The chair was no doubt safer, but it had its inconveniences. Swift describes the unhappy condition of a fop during a "City Shower:" * Night. Second Stage of Cruelty. Enraged Musician. "Box'd in a chair the beau impatient sits, While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits; The leather sounds; -he trembles from within!" The chairmen were very absolute fellows. They crowded round the tavern-doors, waiting for shilling customers; but they did not hesitate to set down their box when a convenient occasion offered for the recreation of a foaming mug.* They were for the most part sturdy Milesians, revelling, if they belonged to the aristocracy, in all the finery of emboidered coats and epaulettes, and cocked hats and feathers. If they were hackney-chairmen they asserted their power of the strong arm, and were often daring enough as a body to influence the fate of Westminster and Middlesex elections, in the terror which they produced with fist and bludgeon. They, and the whole race of bullying and fighting ministers of transit, belonged to what Fielding termed "The Fourth Estate." That dignity is now assigned to the Press. Civilization has been too strong for Barbarism. An ingenious Frenchman thus describes the populace of England :-"The people of the inferior classes are distinguished by a brutishness of which one can scarcely form an idea. Abandoned from their infancy to all the excesses of drunkenness, they display in their whole conduct a spirit of rudeness, of bluntness, and of quarrelsomeness, Hogarth's Beer Street. which engenders those pugilistic encounters of which we have heard so much. Almost all have acquired a deadly aptness in this bloody exercise: rarely does a holiday pass away without a fatal encounter. Noblemen themselves (for England, in its respect for the Golden Calf, has preserved its great barons, the source of all its riches), and even Peers of Parliament, take part sometimes in these street-fights and these porters' quarrels.” There is an English writer who is equally severe upon the "brutishness" of the "fourth estate.' He is speaking most seriously when he complains that "the mob" attack well-dressed river passengers "with all kinds of scurrilous, abusive, and indecent terms;"-that they insult foot passengers by day, and knock them down by night ;-that no coach can pass along the streets without the utmost difficulty and danger, because the carmen draw their waggons across the road, while they laugh at the sufferers from the alehouse window; and finally, that they insult ladies of fashion, and drive them from the Park of a Sunday evening. - But these two descriptions of great masses of the people are not contemporaneous. The Frenchman writes in a work still in course of publication'Encyclopédie Catholique; Répertoire Universel' -which in 1848 had reached eighteen quarto volumes. The Englishman is Henry Fielding, who, if we may judge from concurrent testimony, takes no exaggerated view of the lower London Life of |