None of the panels were identical, but all had been decorated by his workmen. “The pattern-cart of his trade,” Hutton, the Birmingham historian, calls this curiosity, which was once familiar to every village in the Midlands, and his daughter, Catherine Hutton, could remember the printer, “in his gold-laced waistcoat, and his painted chariot, each panel a picture, fresh from his own manufactory of japanned tea-boards.” A most extraordinary conveyance appeared in London in 1771—this being “Mr. Moore’s new-invented Coal-carriage,” the wheels of which were no less than fifteen feet high.[42] A great concourse of people followed it through the streets, and no doubt applauded its ability to draw two caldrons and two sacks of coal, using only two horses abreast, “with more ease and expedition than the common carts do one caldron with three horses at length.” Unfortunately I have not been able to discover a print of this monstrous vehicle, which, like so many of the other mid-century freaks, disappeared almost at once. To this period also belongs that wondrous _phaeton_, which in a few years threatened to become so lofty as to suggest to some ingenious artist the possibility of applying to it some pantograph arrangement whereby its seat could be raised or lowered at will. This print, called The _New Fashioned Phaeton—Sic itur ad Astra_, was published in 1776, a curious mezzotint showing a lady of fashion stepping out of a first-floor window into the seat of a phaeton which has been raised to the required height. The phaetons, indeed, seem to have been built high since their invention, and the importance of this feature must not be overlooked, when one remembers that almost every carriage, both English and foreign, was hung enormously high in the last years of the century, nine or ten steps being sometimes necessary to get inside. Exactly when or where the phaeton was first made I cannot determine, but, like the _landau_, which has generally, though incorrectly, been considered to have been first built in 1757, it is mentioned so early as 1747 in the poem quoted at the end of the last chapter. That it was already popular with the fashionable people is shown by Tom Warton’s poem, _The Phaeton and the One Horse Chair_, which was first published in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for December, 1759. This is worth quoting in its entirety:—