'Tis past! and now succeeds the general doom
Of landlord, barmaid, waiters, ostler, groom;
The coachman's glories have for ever set,
And "boots" has got a place—in the Gazette.
A popular writer who flourished some five and forty years ago quotes a letter from a personal friend, who boasts of the following wonderful feat of locomotion:—
"I was out hunting last season, on a Monday, near Brighton, and dined with my father in Merrion Square, Dublin, at six o'clock on the following Wednesday, distance four hundred miles."
It was done thus:—He went from Brighton in an afternoon coach that set him down in London in time for the Holyhead Mail, and this mail, with the help of the steamer to cross the Channel, delivered him in Dublin at the time mentioned.
What would the writer say now, when, by leaving London at 7.15 a.m., he may dine at the table-d'hôte at the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, at 7.30 p.m., with ample time to have a hot bath and change his dress before dinner is served?
The writer then proceeds to say:—
"In this wonder-working age few greater improvements have been made in any of the useful arts than in those applied to the system of travelling by land. Projectors and projects have multiplied with our years, and the fairy-petted princes of the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments" were scarcely transported from place to place with more facility or dispatch than Englishmen are in a.d. 1832. From Liverpool to Manchester, thirty-six miles, in an hour and a half! Surely Dædalus is come amongst us again."