“The morning came, the chaise was brought,
But yet was not allowed
To drive up to the door, lest all
Should say that she was proud.
“So three doors off the chaise was stayed,
When they did all get in,
Six precious souls, and all agog
To dash through thick and thin.”
John Gilpin.
“IN my journey to London,” wrote an indignant correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine, early in 1747, “I travell’d from Harborough to Northampton, and well was it that I was in a light Berlin, and six good horses, or I might have overlaid in that turnpike road. But for fear of life and limb, I walk’d several miles on foot, met 20 waggons tearing their goods to pieces, and the drivers cursing and swearing for being robb’d on the highway by a turnpike, screen’d under an Act of Parliament.” These turnpikes, or toll-gates, had been but lately established in England for the preservation of the roads. That they did very much immediate good, however, may be doubted. A few years afterwards an English traveller was grumbling at the superiority of the French roads over our own. “Nothing piques me more,” he wrote in an amusingly satirical passage, “than that a trumpery despotic Government, like France, should have enchanting roads from the capital to each remote part.” He seems to have taken trouble to find out the cause for so lamentable a difference, and for this purpose consulted “the most solemn looking waggoner on the road.”