Introduction [1]
The most Ancient Roads [2]
The Assyrian Roads [4]
Caligula’s Whim [5]
Carthaginian Roads [6]
Grecian Roads [7]
Roman Roads [8]
Celtic and Germanic Roads [13]
Roads in the Dark Ages [15]
Insecurity of Travelling [16]
The Norman Barons [17]
Speed in Travelling [22]
Cæsar’s Journeys [23]
Fast Bishops [24]
Roman Senators [25]
Wolsey’s Speed [26]
Lord Peterborough [27]
Travelling Charges [28]
Petruchio’s Horse [29]
Cotton’s Ride [32]
Tour in Derbyshire [33]
Speed in Travelling [37]
Wakes and Fairs [39]
Roman Compitalia [39]
The Fairs of the East [40]
Obstructions to Trade [41]
Expenses and Retinues [42]
Ancient Travellers [43]
The Family Coach [48]
A Journey to London [50]
Highwaymen [53]
The Boston Mail [54]
Arms and the Men [55]
The Decay of Beggars [56]
The Mendicant Orders [57]
Highway Legislation [58]
Roadside Inns [59]
Roadside Meals [60]
Stage Coaches [61]
Dangers of the Road [62]
Voltaire and his Companions [63]
Running Footmen [64]
Out-runners [65]
The Judge and the Bar [66]
Road-making [67]
Tolls and Turnpikes [68]
Miry Roads [69]
Travelling in Search of a Sister [70]
Tardiness of News [72]
Post Chaises [73]
French Postilions [74]
The Pedlar [75]
The Son of Mercury [76]
The Packman’s Ghost [77]
Wordsworth’s Pedlar [78]
A Coachman’s Dirge [79]
Compensation for Speed [80]
Goodly Prospects [81]
The Inns of England [82]
English Innkeepers [83]
English Horses [84]
Old Roads of the Continent [86]
Ser Brunetto [87]
Roads of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France [88]
Roads of Asia [90]
The March up and down [91]
The Early Travellers [92]
The Wilderness of Lop [94]
Hebrew Travellers [94]
A Jewish Road-book [96]
Inns of Cathay [98]
Tartar Post-houses [99]
The Khan’s Foot-posts [100]
The Roads of the Incas [101]
New Roads [104]
Work and Pain [106]
Work and Wages [107]
Reaction and its inconveniences [108]
Sydney Smith [110]
Keeping Troth [111]
Conclusion [112]

OLD ROADS AND NEW ROADS.

We have histories of all kinds in abundance,—and yet no good History of Roads. “Wines ancient and modern,” “Porcelain,” “Crochet work,” “Prisons,” “Dress,” “Drugs,” and “Canary birds,” have all and each found a chronicler more or less able; and the most stately and imposing volume we remember ever to have turned over was a history of “Button-making:” you saw at once, by the measured complacency of the style, that the author regarded his buttons as so many imperial medals. But of roads, except Bergier’s volumes on the Roman Ways, and a few learned yet rather repulsive treatises in Latin and German, we have absolutely no readable history. How has it come to pass that in works upon civilization, so many in number, so few in worth, there are no chapters devoted to the great arteries of commerce and communication? The

subject of roads does not appear even on that long list of books which the good Quintus Fixlein intended to write. Of Railways indeed, both British and foreign, there are a few interesting memorials; but Railways are one branch only of a subject which dates at least from the building of Damascus, earliest of recorded cities.

Perhaps the very antiquity of roads, and the wide arc of generations comprised in the subject, have deterred competent persons from attempting it; yet therefore is it only the more strange that incompetent persons have not essayed “this great argument,” since they generally rush in, where their betters fear to tread. A history of roads is, in great measure indeed, a history of civilization itself. For highways and great cities not merely presuppose the existence of each other, but are also the issues and exponents of two leading impulses in the nature of man. Actuated by the one—the centripetal instinct—the shepherd races of Asia founded their great capitals on the banks of the Euphrates and the Ganges: impelled by the other—the centrifugal instinct—they passed forth from their cradle in the Armenian Highlands, westward as far as the Atlantic, and eastward as far as the Pacific. We have indeed indications of roads earlier than we have accounts of cities. For ages before Arcadian Evander came as a “squatter” to Mount Palatine, was there not the great road of the Hyperboreans from Ausonia to Delphi, by which, with

each revolving year, the most blameless of mankind conveyed to the Dorian Sun-god their offerings? And as soon as Theseus—the organizer of men, as his name imports—had slain the wolves and bears and the biped ruffians of the Corinthian Isthmus, did he not set up a direction-post, informing the wayfarer that “this side was Peleponnesus, and that side was Ionia”? Centuries of thought and toil indeed intervened between the path across the plain or down the mountain-gorge and the Regina Viarum, the Appian Road; and centuries between the rude stone-heap which marked out to the thirsting wayfarer the well in the desert, and the stately column which told the traveller, “This is the road to Byzantium.”

In the land of “Geryon’s sons,” the paths which scaled the sierras were attributed to the toils of Hercules. In Bœotia, at a most remote era, there was a broad carriage-road from Thebes to Phocis, and at one of its intersections by a second highway the homicide of Laius opened the “long process” of woes, which for three generations enshrouded, as with “the gloom of earthquake and eclipse,” the royal house of Labdacus. We have some doubts about the nature, or indeed the existence, of the road along which the ass Borak conveyed Mahommed to the seventh heaven: but we have no grounds for questioning the fact of the great causeway, which Milton saw in his vision, leading from Pandemonium to this earth, for have not Sin and Death

been travelling upon it unceasingly for now six thousand years?

From that region beyond the moon, where, according to Ariosto—and Milton also vouches for the fact,—all things lost on earth are to be found, could we evoke a Carthaginian ledger, we would gladly purchase it at the cost of one or two Fathers of the Church. It would inform us of many things very pleasant and profitable to be known. Among others it would probably give some inkling of the stages and inns upon the great road which led from the eastern flank of Mount Atlas to Berenice, on the Red Sea. This road was in ill odour with the Egyptians, who, like all close boroughs, dreaded the approach of strangers and innovations. And the Carthaginian caravans came much too near the gold-mines of the Pharaohs to be at all pleasant to those potentates: it was

—“much I wis
To the annoyance of King Amasis.”