’Tis a black, burning shame! Must our glory be crush’d,
And the guard’s lively bugle to silence be hush’d?
Oh! ’tis fit that our wrongs we should freely declare,
For we always look’d out for the thing that was fare.
Let mourning as gloomy as midnight be spread
O’er the Swan with Two Necks and the Saracen’s Head;
Let the Black Bull, in Holborn, be cow’d, and the knell
Of glory departed be heard from the Bell.
The Blossoms must speedily fade from the bough, And cross’d are the hopes of the Golden Cross now;
The White Horse must founder, the Mountain fall down,
The Gloster be clos’d, and the Bear be done Brown.
The Eclipse is eclips’d, and the Sovereign is dead,
And the Red Rover now never roves from its shed;
The Times are disjointed, the Blucher at peace,
And the Telegraph shortly from working must cease.
The Victory now must submit to defeat,
And the Wellington own he is cruelly beat;
The sport is all up with the fam’d Tally-Ho,
And the old Regulator no longer will go.
Oh! had I, dear brethren, the muse of a Byron,
I’d write down the system of traveling on iron;
For flying like lightning but poorly atones
For crushing the carcase or breaking the bones.
So, farewell to the Coach-box, farewell to the Vip!
By Fate most unkind we are cotch’d on the hip;
Then join, brother Dragsmen, in sorrowful chorus,
For at present there’s nothing but ruin before us.
On a few out-of-the-way routes, originally not worth the while of railway companies to exploit, coaching did, however, survive an incredible time. Cordery in 1796 painted the even then old-established Chesham coach, and coaches continued to run into Buckinghamshire until quite recent times. Aylesbury, Chesham, Amersham, and Wendover only obtained direct railway accommodation when the Metropolitan Railway, under the lead of Sir Edward Watkin, extended into the country past Harrow and Rickmansworth, reaching Aylesbury in 1892. The Amersham and Wendover coach—really better described as a three-horsed ’bus—went to London daily until 1890, returning from the “Old Bell,” Holborn, at five o’clock in the evening. It was the sole survivor of the host of coaches that left London fifty years earlier.
But two generations have passed away since coaches began to disappear and to become historic, and the “elderly man,” with his enviable memories of a long journey in mid-spring or autumn on the outside of a stage-coach, written about by George Eliot, is no longer to be found, reminiscent of the times that were. Nay, the locomotive steam engine itself is doomed, in turn, to be replaced by self-moving electric motor carriages, and we shall live to drop a salt tear upon an express locomotive retired from active service, or to sigh at sight of a solitary Metropolitan Railway engine placed in a museum of things that were. The days of the prophets were not ended with the Biblical prognosticators, with Nixon, red-faced or otherwise, or with Mother Shipton, or even with Erasmus Darwin, who, although he could foresee steam and the balloon, could not envisage electricity. They included George Eliot, also, among the prophets, shadowing forth, in a most remarkable way, the Central London Railway and other tube lines of our own time, in this extraordinary passage: “Posterity may be shot, like a bullet, through a tube, by atmospheric pressure ... but the slow, old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory. The tube journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory ‘O!’” How true! The scenery on what the vulgar call the “Tuppenny Tube” is distinctly uninteresting.
