Transcribed from the 1852 Chapman and Hall edition by David Price, ccx074@pglaf.org
OLD ROADS
and
NEW ROADS.
“messer ludovico, dove avete cogliato tante coglionerie?”
LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
1852.
printed by
john edward taylor, little queen street,
lincoln’s inn fields.
PREFACE.
Gentle Reader,
If you look to move through this little volume in a direct line, after the present fashion of Railway Travelling, you will be signally disappointed. Nothing can well be more circuitous than the route proposed to you, nor more eccentric than your present guide. This book aspires to the precision of neither Patterson nor Bradshaw. Let men “bloody with spurring, fiery hot with speed,” consult those oracles of swiftness and rectitude of way: we do not belong to their manor. We desire to beguile, by a sort of serpentine irregularity, the occasional tedium of rapid movement. We move to our journey’s end by sundry old-fashioned circuitous routes. Grudge not, while you are whirled along a New Road, to loiter mentally upon certain Old Roads, and to consider as you linger along them the ways and means of transit which contented our ancestors. Although their coaches were slow, and their pack-saddles hard as those of the Yanguesan carriers of La Mancha, yet they
reached their inns in time, and bequeathed to you and me—Gentle Reader—if we have the grace to use them, many pithy and profitable records of their wayfaring. The battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift: neither is the most rapid always the pleasantest journey. Horace accompanied Mæcenas on very urgent business, yet he loitered on the way, and confesses his slackness without shame—