CHAPTER I.
ANCIENT CHARIOTEERS—CELEBRATED WHIPS—INTRODUCTION OF CARRIAGES INTO ENGLAND—MR. CRESSET'S PAMPHLET—THE STATE OF THE ROADS IN 1739—DANGEROUS CONVEYANCES—THE FLYING COACH OF 1669—DEAN SWIFT'S POETICAL LINES ON HIS JOURNEY TO CHESTER—DISCOMFORTS OF INSIDE TRAVELLING—TRAVELLING IN BYGONE DAYS.
CHAPTER I.
Before I allude to the road as it is, let me refer to what it was, and in so doing bring my classical lore into play. Pelops was a coachman, who has been immortalised for his ability to drive at the rate of fourteen miles an hour by the first of Grecian bards. Despite his ivory arm, he got the whip-hand of Œnomaus, a brother "dragsman" in their celebrated chariot-race from Pisa to the Corinthian Isthmus, owing more to the rascality of the state coachman, Myrtilus, whom he bribed to furnish his master, the King of Pisa, with an old carriage, the axletree of which broke on the course, than to his own coaching merits.
Hippolytus, too, "handled the ribbons well," but "came to grief" by being overturned near the sea-shore, when flying from the resentment of his father. His horses were so frightened at the noise of sea-calves, which Neptune had purposely sent there, that they ran among the rocks till his chariot was broken and his body torn to pieces.
Virgil and Horace sang the praises and commemorated the honours of the "whips" of their day. Juvenal tells us of a Roman Consul who aspired to be a "dragsman"—