ERICHTHONIUS, WHEELWRIGHT
I must have missed the Incline in my haste to get back to Brusselton, for I find myself in Athens in the Minoan age, or thereabouts, for the year is 1486 B.C. Everyone seems very excited; porters have thrown down their baskets and are yelling unintelligible words, yet of a pronounced and universal meaning; shoemakers are beating at a house door with their lasts. Whatever is up? A dainty little creature, some now far away Doris, approaches me and says: “Do you know what that old blighter (my Attic is weak) has done? Why, he has invented a thing called a chariot, and all these poor people have lost their jobs.”
Of course, Erichthonius never invented the chariot; the idea of a pure inventor is but a piece of proletarian imagery, a morsel of that ignorance which is the soul of the crowd. This old man, even if he ever lived, which seems doubtful, did no more than Savery did, or Newcomen, or Watt, or Stephenson, or Marconi did; that is, he was a link in that great chain we call progress, each link being the great thought of a great man. Tutenkhamon had his chariot as we well know, and many another before him, and we read in the Acts of the Apostles of a eunuch of great authority, a kind of Maître d’Hôtel of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, journeying to Jerusalem sitting in his chariot reading Esaias, the prophet, which is no mean compliment to the Roman road-makers in Palestine.
I must, however, hasten back to Brusselton, for there lies my goal; but stop, what is this? “A whirlicote,” a “Noah’s Ark,” or, in common language, an Elizabethan coach; for sure—a direct descendent of the handicraft of Erichthonius. The Earl of Rutland, it is said, first built whirlicotes in this country, in 1565, and, in spite of the villainous condition of the roads, my lords and ladies soon took to them. This, apparently, was a sure proof, in its day, that the country was going to the dogs; for, early in the seventeenth century, a bill was brought into Parliament “to prevent the effeminacy of men riding in coaches.” Hitherto Englishmen had ridden or walked, why should they not continue to do so, why not, indeed?
In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the number of coaches in London was reckoned at six thousand and odd, and in a curious old book, published in 1636, and recently reprinted, called “Coach and Sedan,” of these six thousand and odd whirlicotes we read:—
“I easilie (quoth I) beleeve it, when in certaine places of the Citie, as I have often observed, I have never come but I have there, the way barricado’d up with a Coach, two, or three, that what hast, or businesse soever a man hath; hee must waite my Ladie (I know not whose) leasure (who is in the next shop, buying pendants for her eares; or a collar for her dogge) ere hee can find any passage.”
It is Regent Street or Fifth Avenue over again, for, according to this author, when there is a new Masque at Whitehall, the coaches stand together “like mutton-pies in a cooke’s oven,” and then he adds: and “hardly you can thrust a pole between them!”
In its turn, the stage coach was opposed tooth and nail, because it was something new. In 1671, Sir Henry Herbert, M.P., stated that: “If a man were to propose to convey us regularly to Edinburgh in seven days, and bring us back in seven more, should we not vote him to Bedlam?” Sir Henry Herbert is what I call a psychological Proteus, a kind of intellectual amoeba which propagates itself by simple division, the parts of which are always with us and alike—they never die.