“The gilded chariots while they loll at ease
And lazily insure a life’s disease;
While softer chairs the tawdry load convey
To court, to White’s, assemblies or the play.”
Elsewhere he exhorts the pedestrian to assert his rights:—
“Let not the chairman, with assuming stride,
Press near the wall, and rudely thrust thy side;
The laws have set him bounds; his servile feet
Should ne’er encroach where posts defend the street.”
By this time, however, many changes in the chairs had taken place. They seem to have been introduced into Paris in 1617 by M. de Montbrun, though unfortunately from whence this gentleman brought them we are nowhere informed. They were called chaises à porteurs. Possibly English and French chairs were at first quite similar to each other in appearance—square boxes with a pent-house—but in the middle of the century—in Paris, at any rate, they became far more elegant in form, and began to be ornamented and richly upholstered. Some of them resembled, in shape, the body of the modern hansom-cab. This was particularly the case with a new carriage, introduced about 1668, called the brouette (wheelbarrow), roulette, or vanaigrette, which was merely a sedan upon two wheels. It was drawn in the usual way by a man, and was an early form of that vehicle which still survives in the East as the jin-rick-shaw. The brouette held but one person, its wheels were large, and its two poles projected some way in front. One Dupin was apparently the only person to manufacture them, and after his first experiments he applied “two elbow-springs beneath the front, and attached them to the axle-tree by long shackles, the axle-tree working up and down in a groove beneath the inside-seat.” This improvement is of more than ordinary interest in so far as it is the first mention of steel springs to carriages. In the ordinary coaches these steel springs were first applied beneath the bottom of the body. They were probably formed out of a single piece of metal.