“No,” said his companion.
“Then look at it,” he rejoined, “for I think giving her sixpence now is neither sat cito nor sat bene.”
It is astonishing, indeed, how many future Lord Chancellors came from the North. Lord Chancellor Campbell, who as a boy came up to London from Fife in 1798, was among the early arrivals by mail-coach. At that time his father was the admiration of his Fifeshire village, for he was the only one in the place who had been to London. Every one, accordingly, looked up to, and consulted, so great a traveller. He had seen Garrick, too, and was used to boast of the fact, although, it is to be supposed, with discretion and amid the inner circle of his friends, for play-actors were not yet favourites in the dour Scottish mind. Great was the excitement when young Campbell left home. The speed of the coaches had been accelerated, and they now began to reach London from Edinburgh in two days and three nights. Friends advised him to stay in York and recuperate for a day or two after a taste of this headlong speed, lest he—as it was rumoured had happened to others—should be seized with apoplexy from the rush of air at that rate of travelling. But, greatly daring, he disregarded their advice, and came to town direct and in safety.
When railways were introduced, they meant much more than cheap and speedy travelling; they prefigured a social revolution and an absolute reversal of manners and customs. The “great ones of the earth” were really great in the old days; to-day no one is great in the old exclusive sense. Every one can go everywhere—and every one does. Dukes travel in omnibuses and go third-class by train because there is no fourth. If there were, they would go by it, and save the difference.
The judges kept up the practice of going on circuit in their carriages for some little while after railways had rendered it unnecessary; and barristers who used to post to the assizes were for a few years unwilling to be convinced that it was quite respectable and professional to go by train. The juniors were the readiest converts, for the difference in cost touched them nearly. The clergy soon embraced the opportunity of travelling cheaply, for the cloth has ever had, at the least of it, a due sense of the value of money.
Dignified and stately prelates therefore speedily began to look ridiculous by contrast, and the old picture in Punch, once considered exquisitely humorous, of a bishop carrying a carpet-bag, has lost its point. Samuel Wilberforce, when elevated to the Bishopric of Oxford in 1845, was probably the first Bishop to give up his coach and four and his gorgeous lackeys. He rode, unattended, on horseback, and scandalised those who saw him. How much more scandalised would they have been to see bishops ride bicycles: a sight not uncommon in our time.
In the vanished era, only those who could afford it travelled; in the present, only those who cannot afford it go “first.” Jack is as good as his master—“and a d—d sight better,” as the Radical orator said. Caste, happily, is breaking down, and their privileges are being stripped from the governing cliques who for centuries have battened on the public purse. Perhaps it was because they had a prophetic fore-knowledge of all this that the titled and other landowners so strenuously withstood railways at their beginning. They sometimes opposed railways so successfully that great trunk routes, planned to go as direct as possible between two points, were diverted and made circuitous. When the Great Northern Railway was projected it was proposed to follow the highway to the North as nearly as possible, and to go through Stamford; but the Marquis of Exeter opposed the Bill as far as it concerned his own property, and procured a deviation which sent the main line through Grantham, with the results that Stamford languishes while Grantham is made to flourish, and that the short-sightedness of the then Marquis has wofully affected the value of his successor’s property. If the thing were to do again, how eagerly would the Company be invited to take the route it was once forbidden!
XXVI
We, none of us, who read the story of the roads, or who make holiday along them, would really like those old times back, when railways were undreamt of, and travelling for the pleasure of it was unknown. It is sufficient to read the old travellers’ tales, to realise what discouragements from leaving one’s own fireside existed then. There was, for instance, toward the close of the seventeenth century, and well on into the eighteenth, an antiquary of repute who lived at Leeds, and journeyed very frequently in the Midlands, Ralph Thoresby was his name. He travelled much, and in all weathers, and knew the Great North Road well. In his day the coaches were often, through the combined badness of the roads and the severity of the weather, obliged to lay up in the winter, like ships in Arctic seas. Like his much more illustrious contemporary, Pepys, he not infrequently lost his way, owing to the roads at that period having no boundary, and once, he tells us, he missed the road between York and Doncaster, fervently thanking God for having found it again. Indeed, all his journeys end with more or less hearty thanksgivings for a safe return. On one occasion we find him missing his pistols at an inn, and darkly suspecting the landlord to be in league with thieves and murderers; but he finds them, after a nerve-shaking search, and proceeds, thanking the Lord for all his mercies. At another time, journeying to London, he passes, and notes the circumstance, “the great common where Sir Ralph Wharton slew the highwayman.” This was doubtless Witham Common, but, although he alludes to the subject as though it were in his time a matter of great notoriety, all details of this encounter are now sadly to seek, and Sir Ralph Wharton himself lives only in Thoresby’s diary.
Thoresby was a very inaccurate person. He mentions “Stonegate Hole, between Stamford and Grantham,” but he is out of his reckoning by forty miles or so, Ogilby’s map of 1697 marking the spot near Sawtry. Accordingly when we find him, going by coach, instead of by his usual method, on horseback, in May 1714, and noting “we dined at Grantham: had the usual solemnity (this being the first time the coach passed in May), the coachman and horses being decked with ribbons and flowers, the town music and young people in couples before us,” we shrewdly suspect he was referring to the festivities of this kind held at Sutton-on-Trent, twenty-three miles further north.