represents one of his characters as asserting, "the gentleman (I'll undertake with him) is a man of fair living, and able to maintain a lady in her two caroches a day, besides pages, monkeys, parachitoes, with such attendants as she shall think meet for her turn."[144:A]
Beside monkeys and parachitoes, this quotation also proves, that caroches, a species of coach, were common in 1600, when Jonson's play was first acted. The coach and caroch, vehicles differing probably rather in size than form, are thus distinguished by Green, who in his Tu Quoque, 1641, speaks of
——————— "the keeping of a coach
For country, and caroch for London;"[144:B]
and, indeed, in 1595, they seem to have been equally general, for the author of Quippes for upstart newfangled Gentlewemen, says:—
"Our wantons now in coaches dash
From house to house, from street to street."[144:C]
The era of their introduction into this country has been recorded by Taylor, the water-poet. "In the year 1564," he remarks, "one William Boonen, a Dutchman, brought first the use of coaches hither, and the said Boonen was Queene Elizabeth's coachman; for indeede a coach was a strange monster in those days, and the sight of it put both horse and man into amazement: some said it was a great crab shell brought out of China, and some imagined it to be one of the Pagan Temples, in which the Cannibals adored the divell; but at last those doubts were cleared, and coach-making became a substantial trade."[144:D]
So substantial, indeed, had this trade become in 1601, that on the 7th of November of the same year, an act was introduced into the House of Lords, "to restrain the excessive and superfluous use of
coaches, within this realm[145:A];" it was rejected, however, on the second reading, and the trade of coach-making went on progressively increasing.