The post-chaise became extraordinarily popular. The literature of the mid-eighteenth century is full of references to it. All kinds of adventures happened to people in post-chaises. They were seen in every part of the country, they could be hired here, there, and everywhere. Dr. Johnson was only one amongst thousands who loved them. “If I had no duties,” he records, “and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.” “I have tried almost every mode of travelling since I saw you,” wrote Wilkes to his daughter, “in a coach, chaise, waggon, boat, _treckscuyt_, _traineau_, sledge, etc. I know none so agreeable as my English post-chaise.” One thinks naturally of Laurence Sterne. Both in _Tristram Shandy_ and in the _Sentimental Journey_ he has much to say of the post-chaises. “Something is always wrong,” he is grumbling somewhere, “in a French post-chaise, upon first setting out.... A French postillion has always to alight before he has got three hundred yards out of town.” And then, of course, there is that never-to-be-forgotten _désobligeante_ which he purchased from M. Dessein at Calais.[40] “There being no travelling in France and Italy,” he recounts, “without a chaise—and nature generally prompting us to the thing we are fittest for, I walk’d out into the coach-yard to buy or hire something of that kind to my purpose: an old _Désobligeante_, in the furthest corner of the court, hit my fancy at first sight, so I instantly got into it.” And there it was in that queer little carriage which would hold but one person, that Sterne wrote his famous Preface about Travellers, “though it would have been better,” he observed, when interrupted, “in a _Vis-à-Vis_.” The particular _désobligeante_ seems to have proved satisfactory, but for the species Sterne could not find much praise. “In Monsieur Dessein’s coach-yard,” he says, “I saw another old tatter’d _désobligeante_; and notwithstanding it was the exact picture of that which had hit my fancy so much in the coach-yard but an hour before, the very sight of it stirr’d up a disagreeable sensation within me now; and I thought ’twas a churlish beast into whose heart the idea could first enter, to construct such a machine; nor had I much more charity for the man who could think of using it.” It was certainly not a very sociable carriage, but then neither was the sedan: both were very useful. I may conclude this chapter by drawing attention to the tax upon coaches which was levied at the beginning of 1747. From the fuss that was made when such a bill was first introduced—it was temporarily abandoned—you might imagine that one of the most treasured articles of the Constitution was about to be swept away.