tively insensible to snubbing; but each club member, as a rule, is brought to his bearings. These unwritten laws of social equality have been stretched even further at fashionable or intellectual dinner-tables. Crisp talk is everything, and every man with anything in him. hopes to be heard in his turn. Coleridge's interminable disquisitions, with all the fire of their philosophical eloquence, would never be tolerated; and we suspect that even Macaulay would have been scratched from the dinner-lists of many of his admirers unless his brilliant flashes of silence had become more frequent. We wish to be entertained or excited; we do not care to listen to lectures or to rhapsodies over the wine and the walnuts; so that the shortest anecdotes are only accepted with approval if they bring their own apologies as felicitous illustrations, and tedious stories or reminiscences are absolutely tabooed. Sydney Smith, with his ever ready repartee, might still be a welcome guest; but the running fire of jests, puns, and personal allusions with which Theodore Hook kept the table in a roar is gone as entirely out of date as the after-dinner toasts of our grandfathers. Even the refined Lord Eskdale or the witty Mr Pinto would have to be on their guard and take care that they did not become too vivacious. Indeed, the most brilliant and intellectual diners

out of the day are bound over to reserve from personal motives. Either they are in Parliament, when they keep their best things for their speeches; or they have taken honours in the literary world, and sell thoughts and fancies to the periodicals.

CHAPTER VII.

ROADS AND RAILS.

LOOKING back to the travelling of fifty years

Yet

ago as compared with the present, it is the tortoise to the hare in point of pace. little more than fifty years ago, and before the rails were laid down from Liverpool to Manchester, our grandfathers would have said that the travelling was perfection. They had some reason to boast; for, so far as our internal communications were concerned, the progress in the previous generation had been marvellous. Even now it is pleasant, if rather sad, to read "Nimrod's famous Quarterly' article on the Road, although at that time the changes of the future were already dimly perceptible through the smokeclouds from the furnaces of the new-fangled engines. The progress had been marvellous, for that intelligent Scotchman, Mr Macadam, had been hard at work upon the highways. He found them laid down pretty much on the principles

E

"

accepted in England since the days of the Druids. The shortest cut was the first consideration ; hills were scaled by the most uncompromising gradients, while the valleys, which were followed religiously, were so many Sloughs of Despond in the wet season. The heavy coach or the lumbering stage-waggon took its time, with a tremendous expenditure of horse-flesh and whip-cord. Smollett and Fielding describe the leisurely travelling of the days when road companions found time to make ample acquaintance. Even when Vittoria was fought and Waterloo was won, the coachman never hurried his passengers. As "Nimrod" says, he had a calf to consign to the country butcher, or a parcel to deliver to the borough attorney; and when his commissions were discharged, he was always willing to wait if the gentlemen who had been dining at the inn. were disposed for another bottle of port. Mr Macadam very summarily altered all that, anticipating the celerity and punctuality of steam. New roads were engineered, levelled, and drained; rapid and regular delivery began to pay the enterprising capitalists who horsed the swift coaches. Chaplin had 1300 horses in his stables; Horne, who subsequently went into partnership with him, came second with no fewer than 700. The coach-builders had succeeded in combining speed with solidity; the luggage was stowed

away in capacious boots or in the "slides" beneath the body of the vehicle. There was no chance now of linch-pins snapping of a sudden, for the linch-pins were superseded by the patent box-axles. And all these elaborate precautions were indispensable to reduce the inevitable risks to a minimum. The old gentleman supposed by "Nimrod" to have awakened from a Rip-VanWinkle-like slumber had good reason for his grave apprehensions. The coaches galloping

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against each other were running perpetual races with time, and when unpunctuality was punished with heavy penalties and loss of credit, each minute was precious. We are startled nowadays from time to time by some sensational railway accident, yet nobody, as a rule, ever dreams of danger. But in the "Comets" or the Highflyers" at any moment the perils of the transit might be brought unpleasantly home to one. The half-thoroughbred horses cost on an average only about twenty-five pounds; any untractable rogue was consigned to the coaching stables, and the queerest teams were consequently hitched together. They were tamed on each successive day by a spell of severe work; but they fed freely at rack and manger, and were kept in tip-top condition. They were steadied by the drag on steep descents, to be cheated out of half the opposite hill; they swung round the