For customers they’re always willing
And ready aye to earn a shilling.”
Echoes of the Street.
[28] In an article in the Pall Mall Magazine for March, 1912.
[29] Birch’s History of the Royal Society.
[30] Some people have considered that the name was not derived from the city of Berlin, but from an Italian word berlina, “a name given by the Italians to a kind of stage on which criminals are exposed to public ignominy.” This seems rather far-fetched. In England it was always thought to have been built first in Berlin, and was a common enough term for a coach early in the eighteenth century. Swift mentions it in his Answer to a Scandalous Poem (1733):—
“And jealous Juno, ever snarling,
Is drawn by peacocks in her berlin.”
“It should be noted,” says Croal, “that we find the word differently applied in the earlier years of the century, and in such a way as to cast doubts on the derivations quoted. In some of the last Acts passed by the Scottish Parliaments before the Union, there are references to a kind of ship or boat, called a berline. The royal burghs on the west coast of Scotland were in 1705 ordered to maintain two ‘berlines’ to prevent the importation of ‘victual’ from Ireland, this importation being forbidden at the time, and two years later an Act was passed to pay the expenses of the berlines.”
[31] A point of minor interest may here be noticed. When leather was first used for the covering of the coach quarters, the heads of the nails showed. But about 1660, “these nail-heads were covered with a strip of metal made to imitate a row of beads; from this practice arose the name of ‘beading’ which has been retained, although beading is now made in a continuous, level piece, either rounded or angular.” Thrupp.