COACH versus RAIL—DESCRIPTION OF A COACH JOURNEY FROM LONDON TO BATH—DIFFERENCES OF OPINION—THE COACH DINNER—LUXURIOUS LIVING—SNUG HÔTELLERIES—ENGLISH versus FOREIGN COOKING.

CHAPTER V.

"Every medal has its reverse." Many persons may be found who denounce coaching as an abomination; while others declare that railway travelling is most fatal only not to the lives, but to the comforts of Her Majesty's subjects. I pass over the dangers of the rail, and will lay before my readers the opinions expressed by the two contending parties. One declares that, among the many improvements of which this age has been productive—and many and vast have they been—that of travelling unquestionably bears the bell. The very word, however, has now become a misnomer. It is no longer travelling; it is flying over the country, luxuriously and triumphantly, at a pace that equals the hurricane. The rapidity with which travellers are now conveyed by steam over the length and breadth of the country is a social advantage which, for manifold purposes, cannot be too much appreciated. Some may remember, and have not those suffered from, the old slow and sure system?

might have been the motto of those stage-coaches which in former days pursued their way at the rate of six miles an hour, to the misery, inconvenience, and detention of every passenger that was doomed to the adoption of such conveyances. The pillory would now be preferable to the top of a stage-coach on its passage from London to Exeter on a dark, tempestuous night in December. What inexpressible horrors does the very idea suggest!

The expense, too, was no trifling consideration; for after the fare was paid, half of which was recouped if you did not put in an appearance, fees were incessantly demanded and wrung from the luckless traveller, as if he were a sheep born to be fleeced by a pack of merciless hirelings.

Ere you started on your journey, a porter rushed up, and, whether permitted or not, seized your carpet-bag or hat-box, and pitching them into the boot, regardless of their contents, would turn round and, with audacious effrontery, demand a fee for his trouble; ay, and if he did not get it would abuse you roundly to your face. Then, the dignity of the box-seat! "Nota quÆ sedes fuerat columbis"—pigeons they were, with a vengeance, that occupied it. At what price was it purchased! Entailing a double fee—one to the porter for casting your coat upon it, the other to the coachman for the privilege of sitting with your teeth in the wind, sharing his conversation, his rug, and his seat.

Talk not of the spicy team, the rattling bars, which for short journeys in fine weather was an agreeable way of travelling; but for distances the inside of a coach was almost insupportable. Outside in Winter not much better.

Then, again, the great improvement in travelling since the road gave way to the rail is never more deeply felt and rejoiced at than at Easter, Whitsuntide, and the festive season of Christmas, as it enables so many more to visit their friends in the country than was formerly the case, with a greater amount, too, of comfort to themselves, and at a considerably less expense.

In the old days of coaching and posting few, comparatively speaking, would be conveyed to or from the metropolis. Those who travelled post were often detained for horses; and those who went by coach had to book their places weeks before, paying half the fare, and even then a heavy fall of snow might put an end to all journeys. Now, instead of sitting for hours wet through from the pelting pitiless storm outside a coach—instead of being called by candlelight, and traversing the streets in a slow rumbling vehicle, the traveller can enjoy his breakfast in London, can be conveyed to the station in a fast-trotting hansom, can sit snugly protected from the weather, and reach his destination in a fourth of the time his predecessors could on the road.

And here it may not be out of place to describe a journey by coach, say from London to Bath, on a cold raw Winter's day. I speak of the time when the old, crawling, creaking, rattling, six inside vehicle had not given way to the fast four-horse light coach.

Often have I travelled by one of these wretched conveyances to Newbury, when I was at a private tutor's at Donnington Grove. As lucifer-matches had not then been introduced, the only method of getting a light was by striking a flint against a steel in a tinder-box. Your candle lit, a hasty toilet made, you descended, if at an hotel, into a coffee-room, miserably lit, and reeking with the odour of gin, brandy, and punch.

At that early hour, breakfast was out of the question. Then there was the uncertainty whether the hackney-coach you had ordered over night would be forthcoming; if it did arrive, you reached the "White Horse Cellar" or "Gloucester" Coffee-House by a little before six, where a glass of rum and milk, or some "early purl," might be had. If an inside passenger, you were subjected to being "cribb'd, cabin'd, confined" in a small compass, without head or knee room, for nearly sixteen hours. If an outsider, there was the discomfort of cold winds, drifting snow, heavy rain, and dripping umbrellas.

Then the dinners on the road—twenty minutes allowed, with its scalding soup stained warm water, its tough steaks, its Scotch collops, "liquidis profusus odoribus," its underdone boiled leg of mutton, its potatoes, hot without and hard within. Then the scramble for a nook by the fire to dry the soaked coat, cloak, or hat; then the change of coachmen, all of whom expected to be remembered; then the fees to guard and porters. Let anyone picture to himself or herself the miseries of such a journey, and be thankful that they have all nearly vanished under the mighty power of steam.

Having given the opinions of the advocates of the rail, I turn to those of the road, who thus describe the delights of a journey in a fast coach.

They suppose a fine Spring morning, when you find yourself seated by the side of a pleasant companion, behind four blood horses, the roads sufficiently watered by an April shower to lay the dust; the hedgerows shooting forth—buds unfolding, flowers bursting out; the birds carolling cheerfully, as if to welcome the return of Spring; the sun smiling upon the snug cottages, the picturesque village churches, the small hamlets, the peaceful homesteads, the neatly-kept gardens, whose early produce were beginning to bloom—such were the agrÉments of the road.

Every mile presented a new feature; the green fields, the earth teeming with fertility, the velvet lawns, the verdant fields, the luxuriant woods, the peaceful valleys, the shady lanes, the blossomed orchards, the "balmy odours" of nature—her breath upon the breeze—all combined to raise your dull spirits to a state of ecstasy. Then the excitement as the well-appointed "drag" drove through the village, the guard sounding his cheerful horn, and the coach pulled up for a snack at a cleanly wayside public-house, where the buxom landlady and the pretty barmaid dispensed the creature comforts to the hungry guests, their appetites sharpened by a drive of some twenty or five-and-twenty miles.

They then turn to the rail, declaring that, instead of the "balmy odours" of nature—her breath upon the breeze—the traveller is nearly suffocated with the rank smell of oil, smoke, gas, and sulphur. Instead of gazing upon the beauties of England's rural scenery, you are whirled along at the rate of fifty miles an hour, amidst the densest smoke, the groanings of engines, through an embankment of chalk or clay.

Just as you are contemplating a fine mountainous view, a stately viaduct, a picturesque waterfall, or a placid lake, another train meets yours, and entirely hides the prospect from you. Instead of the warm welcome at the inn, apostrophised by Shenstone, or the less ostentatious, although not less sincere, reception at the wayside public-house, you are shown into a huge room that reminds you of the spot where the lions are wont to be fed at the Zoological Gardens, where all is noise, hurry, and confusion; where your pockets are emptied and your inner man not filled, from the caloric qualities of the food and the haste in which you are called upon to devour it; and last, not least, they compare the comfort of a barouche and four, a chariot and pair, starting at your own hour, stopping where you like, with the levelling system of the rail, where high-born dames of great degree are mixed with blacklegs and sharpers, where the "hereditary pillars of the State" congregate with Whitechapel "gents" and Corinthian "swells," where prim old maids are "cheek by jowl" with libertine rouÉs, where young and innocent boarding-school misses sit next to soi-disant captains and needy fortune-hunters, where unprincipled debtors are placed opposite their clamorous creditors, where sage philosophers come in collision with unchained lunatics, and proud peeresses are brought in contact with the frail and fair ones of the demimonde.

They then describe a stage-coach dinner, contrasting it with one that could be had at all good inns on the road when travelling luxuriously in your own carriage. And they lay the scene at the "Red Lion," Henley-on-Thames; at the "Windmill," Salt-hill; at the "Pelican," Newbury; at the "Bear," Reading; at the "Sugar-loaf," Dunstable; at the "Dun Cow," Dunchurch; at the "Hop Pole," Worcester; at the "King's Arms," Godalming; at the "Castle," Taunton; at the "Lion," Shrewsbury; at the "Hand Inn," Llangollen, and at a variety of other excellent inns, many of which have been swept away since the introduction of the rail.

They dwell upon the good old English country fare, which did not require the foreign aid of ornament. Not that they censure French cooking; but what they find fault with—and I heartily concur in this—is an attempt to transmogrify native dishes into Continental ones by what the newspaper advertisements term "a professed woman cook," who is as fit to send up a well-dressed filet de volaille À la Parisienne, a Maintenon cotelette, or a Vol au vent À la financiÈre as she would be to play a match of polo at Hurlingham, or to take the part of the Countess in the "Mariage de Figaro."

The plain and perfect English dinners in bygone days generally consisted of mutton broth, rich in meat and herbs; fresh-water fish in every form, eels stewed, fried, boiled, baked, spitch-cocked, and water-suchet; the purest bread and freshest butter; salmon and fennel sauce; mackerel brought down by coach from the Groves of London, with green gooseberries, and the earliest cucumbers; a saddle of Southdown, kept to a moment and done to a turn; mutton chops, hot and hot; marrow-bones; Irish stews; rump-steaks tender and juicy; chicken and ham, plum-pudding, fruit tarts, trifles, and gooseberry-fool. Then the produce of the grape—no thin, washy claret, at eighteen shillings a dozen; no fiery port, one day in bottle; no sherry at twenty-five guineas the cask; but fine old crusted port, sherry dry and fruity, madeira that had made more than one voyage to India. Our readers must decide between the two opinions.