The million-peopled city
Garwood, John
1853
Coaches when introduced used only by the very Highest Class of Society, and regarded as an effeminacy.
Coaches were introduced in , by a Dutchman, who afterwards became Queen Elizabeth's coachman. " But after a while, divers great bodies, with as great jealousy of the Queen's displeasure, made them coaches, and rid up and down the country in them, to the great admiration of all the beholders; ... then by little and little they grew usual among the nobility and others of the sort, and within twenty years became a great trade of coach-making." [1] Persons of a more middling rank in society after this began to follow the fashion of their superiors, to such an extent that in little | |
165 | more than thirty years a Bill had to be brought into "to restrain the excessive use of coaches." The satirists of manners were very severe on this luxury, and tobacco having been introduced into England about the same period, it was debated by them whether the devil brought tobacco into our country in a coach, or the coach in a mist of tobacco. The common name by which a coach was called in London long after was a "hell cart." [2] It was considered quite unseemly, and a token of the degeneracy of the age, that- |
[3] | |
Footnotes: [1] Stow. [2] Taylor. [3] Evelyn. |