The temptation for display must have been great. Nothing attracted the public attention like a fine coach. In the north of Scotland, indeed, any carriage caused the profoundest astonishment.
“I was entertained,” says a contemporary writer, “with the Surprise and Amusement of the Common People when in the year 1725 a Chariot with six monstrous great Horses arrived here by way of the Sea Coast. An Elephant publicly exhibited in the Streets of London could not have excited greater admiration. One asked what the Chariot was; another, who had seen the gentlemen alight, told the first with a Sneer at his Ignorance, it was a great cart to carry people in, and such like.”
And even in Johnson’s day, when there were few coaches to be found in this part of the country, though a lighter vehicle called in old account books a cheas was sometimes used, public astonishment was great. Yet it was in the north of Scotland that military roads were constructed in 1726 and 1737—not particularly good roads, but very necessary—and the first of their kind.
Swift in Apollo, or a Problem Solved, satirised the prevailing luxury. Compared with Apollo, he says:—
“No heir upon his first appearance,
With twenty thousand pounds a year rents,
E’er drove, before he sold his land,
So fine a coach along the Strand:
The spokes, we are by Ovid told,
Were silver, and the axle gold: