But I anticipate, as the Early Victorian novelists were wont to say. I will quote an account of the journey that appeared in one of the weekly papers at the time, and have the less hesitation in quoting therefrom, because I wrote the article myself, and if a man may not quote himself, who, in Heaven’s name, may he quote?
“Every week-day of this spring-time the ‘Tally-ho’ leaves the ‘Mitre,’ at Hampton Court, for Dorking. At eleven o’clock everything is in readiness save the driver, who puts in a staid and majestic appearance on the box only at the last moment. All around are ostlers and stablemen and men who, although they have nothing whatever to do with the coach, and do not even intend to go by it, are yet drawn here to admire the horses and to surreptitiously pat them after the manner of all Englishmen, who, even if they know nought of the noble animal’s ‘points,’ at least love to see good horse-flesh. Vigorous blasts from ‘yards of tin’ arouse alarums and excursions, and bring faces to the hotel-windows, reminding one, together with the gold-laced red coat of the guard, of the true coaching age, so eloquently written of by that mighty historian of the road, C. J. Apperley, whom men called ‘Nimrod.’
“The appointments and the horse-flesh that go to make a first-rate modern turn-out are luxurious beyond anything that ‘Nimrod’ could have seen, splendid as were some of the crack coaches of his day. Were he here now, he could but acknowledge our superiority in this respect; but we can imagine his critical faculties centred upon what he would have called the ‘tooling’ of the drag, and his disappointment, not in the workmanship of the driver, but in the excellence of the highways of to-day, which give a coachman no opportunities of showing how resourceful he could be with his wrist, nor how scientific with his ‘springing’ of his team. Let us compassionate the critic whose well-trained faculties are thus wasted!
MICKLEHAM CHURCH.
TO DORKING
“But it is full time we were off. A final flourish of the horn, and away we go, our coach making for the heart of Surrey. ‘Southward o’er Surrey’s pleasant hills,’ as Tom Ingoldsby says, we go, to Leatherhead, beside Drayton’s ‘mousling Mole’; and so, with a clatter and a cheery rattle of the harness, past Mickleham, with its wayside church, and Juniper Hall, red-faced, green-shuttered; perched above the roadside, redolent of memories of the French refugees,—of whom M. D’Arblay, the husband of Fanny Burney, was one,—and still wearing a fine and most unmistakable eighteenth-century air, even though, as we pass, an equally undoubted nineteenth-century telegraph-boy comes walking, with the leisurely air peculiar to telegraph-boys, out of its carriage-drive into the road.
