INTERLUDE OF THE CHAIR

JUST as the horse-litter gave way before the coach, so the coach, not long after its appearance, found a serious rival in the man-drawn litter or Sedan chair. When or where this chair came from, or who brought it into use once again, is not known. That Sedan itself was the first place to adopt this chair may be true—the analogy already mentioned holding good—but beyond a few half-serious words in a curious seventeenth-century pamphlet to be quoted in a little, there is no positive evidence whatever. Several writers, indeed, assert that Sedan had nothing to do with the chair for ever associated with its name, but in that tantalising manner which is unfortunately characteristic of former times, omit to state their reason. It has been suggested that sedan was the name of the cloth with which the chair was lined, but if this were so, the cloth most probably took its name from the chair it adorned. But wherever it was first made it is reasonable to suppose that the narrowness of the streets made a smaller vehicle than either coach or horse-litter convenient.

The earliest chair, other than those ancient lecticÆ and f??e?a mentioned in the first chapter, appears to have belonged to the Emperor Charles V, in the first half of the sixteenth century. This, indeed, does bear some resemblance to the common conception of a chair, but the first Sedans of some fifty years later resembled nothing so much as a modern dog-kennel provided with two poles. A more unsociable apparatus was surely never built, and yet its almost immediate popularity is easily explained. With the urban streets not yet properly paved and the eternal jolting of the coach, to the accompaniment of such a clatter as must have made speech almost impossible, anything in the nature of a conveyance that made at once for physical comfort and comparative silence would have been favourably received.

There is mention of a chair being shown in England in 1581—just at the time when the country was beginning to show an interest in carriages—but it was not until after the death of Elizabeth that such a novelty was seen in the streets of London. You are not wholly surprised, moreover, to hear that the innovation was due to Buckingham, that apostle of luxury, who probably first saw the chair on his visit to Spain with Prince Charles. Indeed the Prince is supposed to have brought back three of them with him.

At first, of course, there was opposition.

“Every new thing the People disaffect,” wrote Arthur Wilson, the historian, “They stumble sometimes, at the action for the person, which rises like a little cloud but soon after vanishes. So after, when Buckingham came to be carried upon Men’s shoulders the clamour and the noise of it was so extravagant that the People would rail on him in the Streets, loathing that Men should be brought to as servile a condition as Horses. So irksome is every little new impression that breaks an old Custom and rubs and grates against the public humour. But when Time had made these Chairs common, every loose Minion used them, so that that which got at first so much scandal was the means to convey those privately to such places where they might give much more. Just like long hair, at one time described as abominable, at another time approved as beautiful. So various are the fancies of the times!”

It is to be noticed that Buckingham, according to this account, was carried upon men’s shoulders. This was the case at first, but such a mode was speedily changed for that of hand-poles—at once safer and more comfortable for the occupant, and certainly more convenient for the men.23

John Evelyn disagrees with Wilson and ascribes the introduction of the chair into England to Sir Saunders Duncombe, a Gentleman-Pensioner knighted by James I in Scotland in 1617, who enjoyed Buckingham’s patronage. In his Diary for 1645, he writes of the Neapolitans: “They greatly affect the Spanish gravity in their habit; delight in good horses; the streets are full of gallants on horseback, in coaches and sedans, from hence brought first into England by Sir Saunders Duncombe.” Undoubtedly Duncombe was responsible for the great popularity of the chair in England, and for a time held a monopoly in such chairs as could be had for hire, but it may be that Buckingham suggested this monopoly in the first place, after the temporary opposition to their use had been overcome. Which rather suggests that Spain was actually the first country where they were used, though this is mere conjecture.

In the meantime much was happening to the coaches. They were increasing enormously in number, not only those privately owned, but also those hired out by the day. These latter soon became known as hackney-coaches.24 They seem to have been put on the streets as early as 1605, but “remained in the owner’s yards until sent for.” In 1633 the Strand was chosen as the first regular stand for such coaches by a Captain Bailey, one of the pioneers of the movement.

“I cannot omit to mention,” writes Lord Stafford, “any new thing that comes up amongst us though ever so trivial. Here is one Captain Bailey, he hath been a sea captain, but now lives on land about this city where he tries experiments. He hath erected, according to his ability, some four hackney coaches, put his men in livery and appointed them to stand at the Maypole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rate to carry men into several parts of the town where all day they may be had. Other hackney men veering this way, they flocked to the same place and performed their journeys at the same rate, so that sometimes there is twenty of them together, which dispose up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had at the waterside. Everybody is much pleased with it, for whereas before coaches could be had but at great rate”—one recalls the prices paid by Lord Rutland a few years before—“now a man may have one much cheaper.”

Most of these coaches that were put on to the streets seem to have been old and disused carriages belonging to the quality. Many of them still bore noble arms, and, indeed, it would seem that when the hackneys were no longer disused noblemen’s carriages, the proprietors found it advisable to pretend that they were. Nearly every hansom and four-wheeled cab at the end of the nineteenth century bore some sort of coronet on its panels.

The drivers of these first hackneys wore large coats with several capes, one over the other, for warmth. London, however, seems to have been the only town in which they were to be seen. “Coaches,” wrote Fynes Morison in 1617, “are not to be hired anywhere but in London. For a day’s journey a coach with two horses is let for about 10s. a day, or 15s. with three horses, the coachman finding the horses’ feed.” From the same author it would appear that most travellers still doggedly kept to their horses, and indeed, in some counties a horse could be hired for threepence a day, an incredibly small sum. “Carriers,” he also records, “have long covered waggons in which they carry passengers too and fro; but this kind of journeying is very tedious; so that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort.” These were the stage-waggons which in due course gave rise to the stage-coaches, which in their turn were superseded by the mail-coaches.

A similar movement in France gave rise to the fiacres, so called from the sign of St. Fiacre, which adorned one of the principal inns in Paris, in front of which the public coaches stood. In Scotland, too, one Henry Andersen, a native of Pomerania, had in 1610 been granted a royal patent to provide public coaches in Scotland, and for some years ran a service between Edinburgh and Leith. England had yet to follow Andersen’s example, but the hackneys were increasing so rapidly in London that in 1635 a proclamation was issued to suppress them. And it is to be noticed that Taylor’s diatribes were directed more particularly against these public conveyances than against the privately owned carriages, which, after all, could hardly affect his trade. The proclamation was as follows:—

“That the great numbers of Hackney Coaches of late time seen and kept in London, Westminster, and their Suburbs, and the general and promiscuous use of Coaches there, were not only a great disturbance to his Majesty, his dearest Consort the Queen, the Nobility, and others of place and degree, in their passage through the Streets; but the Streets themselves were so pestered, and the pavements so broken up, that the common passage is thereby hindered and more dangerous; and the prices of hay and provender and other provisions of stable, thereby made exceeding dear: Wherefore We expressly command and forbid, That, from the feast of St. John the Baptist next coming, no Hackney or Hired Coach, be used or suffered in London, Westminster, or the Suburbs or Liberties thereof, excepting they be to travel at least three miles out of London or Westminster, or the Suburbs thereof. And also, that no person shall go in a Coach in the said Streets, except the owner of the Coach shall constantly keep up Four able Horses for our Service, when required.”

It is dated January 19th, 1635/6, and must have had a considerable, if temporary, effect, for as Samuel Pegge points out in his unfinished manuscript on the early use of coaches25 it could not “operate much in the King’s favour, as it would hardly be worth a Coach-master’s while to be at so great a contingent charge as the keeping of four horses to be furnished at a moment’s warning for His Majesty’s occasional employment.”

It was then that Sir Saunders Duncombe obtained his monopoly, and, of course, everything was in his favour. The actual patent granted to him belongs to the previous year, but the two are approximately contemporary. From a letter written in 1634 to Lord Stafford, it appears that Duncombe had in that year forty or fifty chairs “making ready for use.” Possibly the whole thing was worked up by Buckingham and his satellites. Duncombe’s patent gave the enterprising knight the right “to put forth and lett for hire” the new chairs for a term of fourteen years. In his petition he had explained that “in many parts beyond the seas, the people there are much carried in the Streets in Chairs that are covered; by which means very few Coaches are used amongst them.” And so Duncombe was allowed to “reap some fruit and benefit of his industry,” and might “recompense himself of the costs, charges, and expences” to which he had, or said he had, been put.

For two years these covered chairs held the advantage, and indeed seem to have been exceedingly popular. There is a most amusing pamphlet, which I have already mentioned, “printed by Robert Raworth, for John Crooch,” in 1636, entitled Coach and Sedan pleasantly disputing for Place and Precedence, the Brewer’s Cart being Moderator. It is signed “Mis-amaxius,” and is dedicated “to the Valorous, and worthy all title of Honor, S^r Elias Hicks.” “Light stuffe,” the author calls it, and tells us that he is “no ordinary Pamphleteer ... onely in Mirth I tried what I could doe upon a running subject, at the request of a friend in the Strand: whose leggs, not so sound as his Judgement, enforce him to keepe his Chamber, where hee can neither sleepe or studie for the clattering of Coaches.” It is an interesting little production, both for its own whimsicalities and for the sidelights it affords into the town’s views on the subject of vehicles at the time. It starts with the cuckoo warning the milkmaids of Islington to get back to Finsburie. The writer, accompanied by a Frenchman and a tailor, walks back to the city, and in a narrow street comes across a coach and a sedan quarrelling about which of them is to “take the wall.”

“Wee perceived two lustie fellowes to justle for the wall, and almost readie to fall together by the eares, the one (the lesser of the two) was in a suite of greene after a strange manner, windowed before and behind with Isen-glasse, having two handsome fellowes in greene coats attending him, the one went before, the other came behind; their coats were lac’d down the back with a greene-lace sutable, so were their halfe sleeves, which perswaded me at first they were some cast suites of their Masters; their backs were harnessed with leather cingles, cut out of a hide, as broad as Dutch-collops of Bacon.

“The other was a thick burly square sett fellow, in a doublet of Black-leather, Brasse-button’d down the brest, Backe, Sleeves, and winges, with monstrous wide bootes, fringed at the top, with a net fringe, and a round breech (after the old fashion) guilded, and on his back-side an Atcheivement of sundry Coats in their propper colors, quarterd with Crest, Helme and Mantle, besides here and there, on the sides of a single Escutchion or crest, with some Emblematicall Word or other; I supposed, they were made of some Pendants, or Banners, that had beene stollen, from over some Monument, where they had long hung in a Church.

“Hee had onely one man before him, wrapt in a red cloake, with wide sleeves, turned up at the hands, and cudgell’d thick on the backe and shoulders with broad shining lace (not much unlike that which Mummers make of strawe hatts) and of each side of him, went a Lacquay, the one a French boy, the other Irish, all sutable alike: The Frenchman (as I learned afterward) when his Master was in the Countrey, taught his lady and his daughter French: Ushers them abroad to publicke meetings, and assemblies, all saving the Church whither shee never came: The other went on errands, help’d the maide to beate Bucks, fetch in water, carried up meate, and waited at the Table.”

The writer attempts mediation, and his offer is favourably received. The combatants explain who they are. The burly fellow speaks first:—

“My name Sir (quoth hee) is Coach, who am a Gentleman of an anciente house, as you may perceive by my so many quarter’d coates, of Dukes, Marquises, Earles, Viscounts, Barons, Knights, and Gentlemen, there is never a Lord or Lady in the land but is of my acquaintance; my imployment is so great, that I am never at quiet, day or night; I am a Benefactor to all Meetings, Play-houses, Mercers shops, Taverns, and some other houses of recreation.... This other that offers me the wrong, they call him Mounsier Sedan, some Mr. Chair, a Greene-goose hatch’d but the other day ... and whereas hee is able with all the helpe and furtherance hee can make and devise, to goe not above a mile in an houre; as grosse as I am, I can runne three or foure in halfe an houre; yea, after dinner, when my belly is as full as it can hold (and I may say to you) of dainty bitts too.”

Whereupon the sedan chimes in:—

“Sir, the occasion of our difference was this: Whether an emptie Coach, that has a Lords head painted Coate and Crest, as Lion, Bull, Elephant, &c. upon it without, might take the wall of a Sedan that had a knighte alive within it.” I confess, he goes on to say, I am “a meere stranger, till of late in England; therefore, if the Law of Hospitalitie be observed (as England hath beene accounted the most hospitable kingdome of the World,) I ought to be the better entertained, and used, (as I am sure I shall) and find as good friends, as Coach hath any, it is not his bigge lookes, nor his nimble tongue, that so runnes upon wheeles, shall scare mee; hee shall know that I am above him both in esteeme, and dignitie, and hereafter will know my place better.... Neither, I hope, will any thinke the worse of mee, for that I am a Forreiner; hath not your Countrey Coach of England been extreemly enriched by strangers?”

Indeed, all your luxuries, he continues, are foreign, your perfumes are Italian, and your perukes made in France.

For some time it seems that Sedan is getting the best of it. Whereas the coach, he argues, has to wait out in the cold streets often for hours at a time, he is many times admitted into the privacy of my Lady’s chamber, where he is rubbed clean both within and without. “And the plain troath is,” he concludes, “I will no longer bee made a foole by you ... the kenell is your naturall walke.” At this moment a carman appears and supports the sedan. Coaches, he says, keep the town awake, endanger the lives of children, and, particularly in the suburbs, “be-dash gentlemen’s gowns.” There then follows a curious piece of dialogue between Sedan and Powel, a Welshman, one of his attendants:—

“Sedan. We have our name from Sedanum, or Sedan, that famous Citie and Universitie, belonging to the Dukes of Bevillon, and where hee keepes his Court.”

“Powel. Nay, doe you heare mee Master, it is from Sedanny, which in our British language, is a brave, faire, daintie well-favoured Ladie, or prettie sweete wench, and wee carrie such some time Master....”

Most of the morning is wasted by such desultory talk, and the street becomes blocked. There comes on the scene a waterman, who, of course, is equally antagonistic to both, and would throw coach and sedan into the Thames if he were not afraid of blocking the stream, and so bringing harm to himself. There follows him a country farmer, who thinks the sedan the honester and humbler of the two, but really knows very little about it. “I heare no great ill of you,” he is good enough to say, but is bound to add, “I have had no acquaintance with your cowcumber-cullor’d men.” Yet in the country he has in his way tried a sedan-chair, which is a “plaine wheele-barrow,” just as his cart is his coach “wherein now and then for my pleasure I ride, my maides going along with me.” But if they both come to Lincolnshire, the sedan, he thinks, will receive a warmer welcome than the coach.

After him comes a country vicar who has no hesitation in accusing the coach of all sorts of robberies. Soon, he cries, you will be “turned off.” You never cared for church, and indeed, during service, you disturb everybody rumbling your loudest outside. Also you are so set up that you will never give place “either to cart or carre.” A surveyor is less personal than the vicar, but has little good to say of the coach, although he agrees with most of the others that for a nobleman of high rank, it is something of a necessity.

Finally the brewer appears and speedily puts an end to the wrangle.

“With that, comes up unto us a lustie tall fellow, sitting betweene two mostrous great wheeles, drawne by a great old jade blinde of an eie, in a leather pilch, two emptie beere-barrels upon a brewer’s slings besides him, and old blew-cap all bedaub’d, and stincking with yest.... My name is Beere-cart, quoth hee, I came into England in Henry the Seventh’s time.”

And the decision of the cart is, of course, that both coach and sedan shall give way to him. They are both to exercise great care, and the sedan is to have the wall. And he adds, turning to the smaller vehicle, a sentence which it is difficult to understand.

“You shall never,” he says, “carrie Coachman againe, for the first you ever carried was a Coachman, for which you had like to have sufferd, had not your Master beene more mercifull.”

Such quarrels were very frequent, not only at this time, but right on through the eighteenth century. Swift in one of his letters to Stella mentions an accident due to the carelessness of a chairman. “The chairman that carried me,” he says, “squeezed a great fellow against a wall, who wisely turned his back, and broke one of the side glasses in a thousand pieces. I fell a scolding, pretended I was like to be cut to pieces, and made them set down the chair in the Park, while they picked out the bits of glasses: and when I paid them, I quarrelled still, so they dared not grumble, and I came off for my fare: but I was plaguily afraid they would have said, God bless your honour, won’t you give us something for our glass?”

Swift was the author of an amusing satire on the same subject, wherein coach and sedan were no better friends than of old.

A CONFERENCE BETWEEN SIR HARRY PIERCE’S CHARIOT AND MRS. D. STOPFORD’S CHAIR

Chariot

Chair

Chariot

Gay seems to have shared the watermen’s disgust at both coach and sedan.

he says of those willing to use the chair. In another place he is comparing the two:—

Elsewhere he exhorts the pedestrian to assert his rights:—

By this time, however, many changes in the chairs had taken place. They seem to have been introduced into Paris in 1617 by M. de Montbrun, though unfortunately from whence this gentleman brought them we are nowhere informed. They were called chaises À porteurs. Possibly English and French chairs were at first quite similar to each other in appearance—square boxes with a pent-house—but in the middle of the century—in Paris, at any rate, they became far more elegant in form, and began to be ornamented and richly upholstered. Some of them resembled, in shape, the body of the modern hansom-cab. This was particularly the case with a new carriage, introduced about 1668, called the brouette (wheelbarrow), roulette, or vanaigrette, which was merely a sedan upon two wheels. It was drawn in the usual way by a man, and was an early form of that vehicle which still survives in the East as the jin-rick-shaw. The brouette held but one person, its wheels were large, and its two poles projected some way in front. One Dupin was apparently the only person to manufacture them, and after his first experiments he applied “two elbow-springs beneath the front, and attached them to the axle-tree by long shackles, the axle-tree working up and down in a groove beneath the inside-seat.” This improvement is of more than ordinary interest in so far as it is the first mention of steel springs to carriages. In the ordinary coaches these steel springs were first applied beneath the bottom of the body. They were probably formed out of a single piece of metal.

In the case of the brouette there was the usual opposition—this time from the proprietors of the ordinary sedans—but although a temporary prohibition was made, the brouette triumphed, and in 1671 was a common sight in the streets of Paris. It was not very suitable for decoration. As one French writer remarks, it was enough if the machine were solidly constructed. The brouette had windows at the sides and a small support in front of the wheels to allow the carriage to maintain its proper position when not held up by an attendant.

The brouette does not seem to have come immediately to England, though in the eighteenth century there was a sedan cart, similar in appearance to it, to be seen in London. On the other hand, the ordinary sedans were rapidly gaining in popularity, and maintained that popularity right through the reigns of the first three Georges.

In appearance they became rather more graceful towards the middle of the century, though less so in later days. The public chairs were generally made of black or dark green leather, ornamented with gold “beading,” the frame and roof, which had a double slope, being of wood, as was also the small square window-frame. Private chairs, however, could be as gorgeous as the owner pleased, though in this respect continental chairs far surpassed our own. At Paris are shown two magnificent chairs which belonged to Louis XV.

“These,” says Croal, “have glass windows in side and front, through which the sumptuous lining of crimson velvet is discernible. The outside is beautifully painted and gilt, and though now somewhat faded, the splendour of the vehicles can be imagined, even in their decay. The gorgeously attired king within, or it might be the queen or some reigning favourite, would be attended by a gay escort of gentlemen of the court, with a crowd of bearers and lacqueys, not to speak of armed guards, whose liveries probably equalled in grandeur the courtly habits of the greater men who surrounded the royal chair.”

At South Kensington a private English chair of about 1760 is shown, “rather handsomely ornamented in ormolu, the sides being divided into four panels, but without windows. In form,” continues Croal, “the chair may be described as ‘carriage-bodied,’ not being, as the later chairs, square at the bottom. At the two front corners heavy tassels are hung, and through the door in front it can be seen that the interior lining is of figured damask. The bearing rings through which the poles passed are of brass.” This, however, cannot compare with an Italian nobleman’s large conveyance of the early eighteenth century which shows a profusion of gold filigree work on the roof that calls to mind nothing so strongly as a Buszard wedding-cake. It belonged to a member of the Grand Ducal family of Tuscany, by whom it was used on baptismal occasions. Here, besides the gilt work on the roof, there is a medallion-painting of figures in antique costume over the door. The walls are painted a pale French grey “with elaborately carved mouldings round the panels, with groups of flowers painted in the middle. The interior is lined with satin corresponding to the painting outside, being in gold and colours upon a pale ground.”

The chairmen do not seem to have been a particularly agreeable lot of fellows. In London they were generally Irish or Welsh. They were often drunk, often careless, and nearly always uncivil. Says Gay:—

In Edinburgh, however, where there were ninety chairs in 1738, the chairmen were Highlanders and rather more civil. “An inhabitant of Edinburgh,” says Hugh Arnot in his history of that city (1789), “who visits the metropolis can hardly suppress his laughter at seeing the awkward hobble of a street chair in the city of London.” We learn from Markland that in 1740 a chair in Edinburgh could be hired for four shillings a day or twenty shillings a week.26 In London, according to George Selwyn, you could be carried three miles for a shilling.27 In Edinburgh, again, where chairs were used at a later date than anywhere in England, rules were made for the public convenience in 1740, the most interesting of these being one which forbade a soldier in the service of the city guard to carry a chair at any time. By 1789 their numbers had increased to 238, including fifty privately owned.

Scattered mention of them occurs amongst British authors. Steele, in one of his Tatler papers, proposes to levy a tax upon them, and regrets that the sumptuary laws of the old Romans have never been revived. The chairmen, or “slaves of the rich,” he says, “take up the whole street, while we Peripatetics are very glad to watch an opportunity to whisk across a passage, very thankful that we are not run over for interrupting the machine, that carries in it a person neither more handsome, wise, nor valiant, than the meanest of us.”

Matthew Bramble in Humphrey Clinker is made to draw a wretched picture of the chairs which abounded in Bath at the middle of the century:—

“The valetudinarian,” he writes, “is carried in a chair, betwixt the heels of a double row of horses, wincing under the curry-combs of grooms and postilions, over and above the hazard of being obstructed or overturned by the carriages which are continually making their exit or their entrance. I suppose, after some chairmen shall have been maimed, and a few lives lost by those accidents, the corporation will think in earnest about providing a more safe and commodious passage.... If, instead of the areas and iron rails, which seem to be of very little use, there had been a corridor with arcades all round, as in Covent Garden, the appearance of the whole would have been more magnificent and striking; those arcades would have afforded an agreeable covered walk, and sheltered the poor chairmen and their carriages from the rain, which is here almost perpetual. At present the chairs stand soaking in the open street from morning to night, till they become so many boxes of wet leather, for the benefit of the gouty and rheumatic, who are transported in them from place to place. Indeed, this is a shocking inconvenience, that extends over the whole city; and I am persuaded it produces infinite mischief to the delicate and infirm. Even the close chairs, contrived for the sick, by standing in the open air, have their fringe linings impregnated, like so many sponges, with the moisture of the atmosphere.”

It was to Bath that Princess Amelia was carried in a sedan by eight chairmen from St. James’s, in April, 1728. This must easily have been the longest, and, so far as the chairmen were concerned, the most wearisome journey ever performed by a chair.

John Wilkes mentions in one of his letters to his daughter that he ascended Mont Cenis in a chair “carried by two men and assisted by four more.” “This,” he says, “was not a sedan chair, but a small wicker chair with two long poles; there is no covering of any kind to it.” Such open chairs seem to have been very uncommon, and were, I imagine, unknown in England. Some, however, had more glass than others, and their size fluctuated. Fashionable ladies must have found a difficulty in getting into a public chair of the ordinary size at the time of the large hoop petticoat, and there is a satiric print, dated 1733, which shows a lady thus attired, being hauled out through the opened roof of one with ropes and pulleys. Similarly, when forty or fifty years later the head-dress of the women became so enormous, a ludicrous print appeared showing a patent arrangement whereby the roof of a chair could be raised on rods to as great a height as was required.

In general the roof opened upwards, being hinged at the back. This is clearly shown in a print published in 1768, called The Female Orators, in which a clergyman is stepping out of his chair, and the chairmen very obviously demanding their fare. Another print published about 1786, called the Social Pinch, shows a very famous chairman, Donald Kennedy, offering his “mull” to Donald Balack, a native of Ross-shire, whom he had just set down. Here the structure of the public chair in use at this date is clearly shown.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the chair as a mode of conveyance was on the wane. Fenimore Cooper in his Sketches of English Society (1837) was able to write: “Sedan chairs appear to have finally disappeared from St. James’ Street. Even in 1826 I saw a stand of them that has since vanished. The chairs may still be used on particular occasions, but were Cecilia now in existence, she would find it difficult to be set down in Mrs. Benfield’s entry from a machine so lumbering.” Which suggests that the chair had not only degenerated in numbers, but also in appearance. They had become larger and uncouth in Cooper’s day. One is reminded of that chair in Pickwick, which “having been originally built for a gouty gentleman with funded property, would hold Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Tupman at least as comfortably as a modern post-chaise.” Yet so late as 1775 the popularity of the chair had been at its highest. It was the old story. With the new century were coming new ideas. The chair slowly and quite naturally was dropping out of existence.

In Edinburgh, as I have said, it lingered on for rather a longer time. In 1806 stringent regulations were still required. Those chairs which maintained their stand at night had to have “a light fixed on the fore part of one of the poles.” On the occasion of a fire or a mob the chairmen had to hurry to the scene of excitement, and there await the magistrate’s orders. They were not allowed to charge more than ninepence a mile, seven-and-six a day, or a guinea and a half a week. Such rates, too, continued to be set out in the Edinburgh Almanac until 1830. After that comes an ominous silence. By that time only the private chair was in use.

“Lady Don,” says Lord Cockburn in his Memorials, “was about the last person (so far as I recollect) in Edinburgh, who kept a private sedan chair. Hers stood in the lobby and was as handsome and comfortable as silk, velvet, and gilding could make it. And when she wished to use it two well-known respectable chairmen, enveloped in her livery cloaks, were the envy of her [superannuated] brethren. She and Mrs. Rochead both sat in Tron Church; and well do I remember how I used to form one of the cluster that always took its station to see these beautiful relics emerge from coach and chair.”

The time, indeed, had come when the sight of a chair was as much a public entertainment as it had been when Buckingham had been borne through the streets “on men’s shoulders.”

Yet although they so rapidly disappeared off the face of Europe, in Asia they lost little of their popularity, and in many places to-day are the only methods of conveyance in common use. China, in particular, had long been a land of sedans. John Barrow in his Collection of Authentic, Useful, and Entertaining Voyages and Discoveries, 1765, mentions the fact that at an early date the Chinese “small covered carriages on two wheels, not unlike in appearance to our funeral hearses, but only about half their length,” had been superseded by chairs. To a European, he relates, this was hardly surprising, as the carriage was anything but comfortable, and required you to sit on your haunches at the bottom—“the most uneasy vehicle that can be imagined.”

“‘The Chinese,’ records another eighteenth-century traveller, ‘occasionally travel on horseback, but their best land conveyance by far is the sedan, a vehicle which certainly exists among them in perfection. Whether viewed with regard to lightness, comfort, or any other quality associated with such mode of carriage, there is nothing so convenient elsewhere. Two bearers place upon their shoulders the poles, which are thin and elastic and in shape something like the shafts of a gig, connected near the ends, and in this manner they proceed forward with a measured step in an almost imperceptible motion, and sometimes with considerable speed. Instead of panels, the sides and back of the chair consist of woollen cloth for the sake of lightness with a covering of oilcloth against rain. The front is closed with a hanging blind of the same materials in lieu of a door, with a circular aperture of gauze to see through.... Private persons among the Chinese are restricted to two bearers, ordinary magistrates to four, and the viceroys to eight, while the Emperor alone is great enough to require sixteen.’”

There is further mention of these Chinese chairs in Oliphant’s much later account of Lord Elgin’s mission. Lord Elgin himself travelled in a chair of the kind usually reserved for mandarins of the highest rank, which was larger than those in ordinary use and had a fine brass knob on the top. Eight bearers carried it. In processions a hwakeaou or flowered chair was often used.

Japan, too, had early had sedans both for travelling and for more purely ceremonial purposes. Light bamboo chairs, they were, called kangoes or norimons, which were borne by two or more persons. On the introduction of the European coach, however, a kind of brouette, as I have said, was substituted, and in a few years there were hundreds of thousands of these jin-rick-shaws on the streets, not only in Japan, but throughout Asia. At first many of these were grotesquely adorned, but their appearance is too well-known at the present day for need of a lengthy description. Equipped with “every modern convenience” and very well built indeed, they afford a European a delightful sensation on his first ride, even though he may have visions of those earlier days of his youth when he was carried about in a similar way (though at a less speed) in the homely perambulator.