Holcroft also noticed in Amsterdam what he called “a travelling haberdasher’s shop with wheels, rolled through the streets by its master.” This appears to have been some sort of light travelling booth. In Paris itself, he records, “there is scarcely a street which is not so narrow as to be extremely dangerous to foot passengers. They are rendered more so at some times by the extreme carelessness, and at others by the brutal insolence, of coachmen. There is no foot pavement; and the only guard against carriages is formed by large stones placed at certain distances, but close to the wall.” In Germany, too, he found little to please him, and warns Englishmen against bringing English-built carriages into that country, for of a surety they will be “broken up.” England, indeed, about this time, seems to have been by far the most progressive country as regards locomotion. _Chapter the Ninth_ _INVENTIONS GALORE_ “Prime of Life to ‘go it!’ where’s the place like London: Four-in-hand to-day, tomorrow you may be undone: Where the Duke and the ’prentice they dress much the same: You cannot tell the difference, excepting by the name! Then push along with four-in-hand, while others drive at random, In buggy, gig or dog-cart, in curricle or tandem.” EGAN, _Life in London_. If William Felton’s book shows the great improvements that had taken place in English carriage-building during the latter half of the eighteenth century, William Bridges Adams’s _English Pleasure Carriages_, published in 1837, sufficiently shows the enormous improvements which had followed upon Obadiah Elliott’s invention of the elliptic springs.[47] In the first place you had a whole series of light, perchless carriages being built, and in the second you had the new macadamised roads upon which to run them. In treating of all these various carriages, it is difficult to know where to begin. A mere catalogue with a few lines of description cannot be very satisfactory, and yet there seems no other method to adopt. Bridges Adams, who was a coachbuilder himself and the inventor of several novel carriages, is a good guide, but one could have wished that his book had been illustrated by anything rather than those fearsome diagrams which mean so little to any one but a coachbuilder himself. From the beginning of the century, indeed, illustrations of carriages began to take on that diagrammatic aspect which the trade-papers still maintain; while at the same time the old prints and caricatures began to disappear. It is a pity, but it cannot be helped.