After reading such an account, it is difficult to understand why any one preferred coach to horseback on a cross-country journey. No wonder Gay was goaded to ask:—
“Who can recount the coach’s various harms,
The legs disjointed, and the broken arms?”
“In the wide gulph,” he says in another place,
“the shatter’d coach o’erthrown
Sinks with the snorting steeds; the reins are broke,
And from the crackling axle flies the spoke.”
Yet, according to Swift, Gay was not so averse to the coach in his later years. Writing to him in 1731, the Dean says:—
“If your ramble was on horseback, I am glad of it on account of your health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between stage-coaches and friends’ coaches: for you are as arrant a cockney as any hosier in Cheapside.... You love twelve-penny coaches too well, without considering that the interest of a whole thousand pounds brings you but half a crown a day.”