rendering the act of driving difficult, and lessening the power of the drivers over their horses. The servant’s seat behind”—not always present—“placed on curved blocks without any springs, completed this extraordinary-looking vehicle. To sit on such a seat, when the horses were going at much speed, would require as much skill as is evinced by a rope-dancer at the theatre.” Which shows that in 1837, at any rate, people’s ideas had undergone a considerable change with regard to a really fashionable equipage. The only other four-wheeled vehicle I need mention here was the _sociable_ which, according to Felton, was “merely a phaeton with a double or treble body.” It was made with or without doors, and with or without a driving seat. A good example of this carriage is shown in Gillray’s print _The Middlesex Election of 1804_. Coming to the two-wheeled vehicles, the chief of these were the _curricle_, the _gig_ or _chaise_, and the _whiskey_. As a general rule it may be taken that when a gig had two horses it was called a curricle, and when there was only one, a chaise. In the Prince Regent’s time the curricle was “the most stylish of all conveyances.” In shape nearly all these gigs were identical, though one reads that the notorious “Romeo” Coates drove in one whose body was shaped like a shell.[44] They were of various heights, a particularly lofty one being known in Ireland as the _suicide gig_. The _caned whiskey_ was a gig whose body, “fixed upon the shafts—which again were connected with the long horizontal springs by scroll irons,” had a movable hood. The _Rib Chair_ was similar to the whiskey, but without springs. It is really only possible to differentiate properly between these light carriages and the other hybrids, so soon to appear, by means of prints and photographs. To the non-technical mind they are almost identical with each other. “The prettiest of these vehicles,” Leigh Hunt writes, after confessing that he has no ambition to drive tandem, as was so often done, or to run into danger with a phaeton, “is the curricle, which is also the safest. There is something worth looking at in a pair of horses, with that sparkling pole of steel laid across them. It is like a bar of music, comprising their harmonious course. But to us, even gigs are but a sort of unsuccessful gentility. The driver, to all intents and purposes, had better be on the horse.” I need say very little of the public carriages. There is, however, one point in connection with the later stage-coaches which bears upon the question that was only solved by Obadiah Elliott in 1804. On September 20, 1770, according to the _Annual Register_, there was an accident to one of them which was growing increasingly common.