“By thy ungallant bearing and sad mien, An inch appears the utmost thou couldst budge; Yet at the slightest nod, or hint, or sign, Round to the curb-stone patient dost thou trudge; School’d in a beckon, learned in a nudge; A dull-eyed Argus watching for a fare; Quiet and plodding, thou doest bear no grudge To whisking Tilburies, or Phaetons rare, Curricles, or Mail-coaches, swift beyond compare.” Dickens was familiar with these hackneys, and in one of the _Sketches by Boz_ draws a picture of them. “Take a regular, ponderous, rickety, London hackney-coach, of the old school, and let any man have the boldness to assert, if he can, that he ever beheld any object on the face of the earth which at all resembles it unless, indeed, it were another hackney-coach of the same date. We have recently observed on certain stands, and we say it with deep regret, rather dapper green chariots, and coaches of polished yellow, with four wheels of the same colour as the coach, whereas it is perfectly notorious to every one who has studied the subject, that every wheel ought to be of a different colour, and a different size. These are innovations, and, like other miscalled improvements, awful signs of the restlessness of the public mind, and the little respect paid to our time-honoured institutions. Why should hackney-coaches be clean? Our ancestors found them dirty, and left them so. Why should we, with a feverish wish to ‘keep moving,’ desire to roll along at the rate of six miles an hour, while they were content to rumble over the stones at four? These are solemn considerations. Hackney-coaches are part and parcel of the law of the land; they were settled by the Legislature; plated and numbered by the wisdom of Parliament. “Then why have they been swamped by cabs and omnibuses? Or why should people be allowed to ride quickly for eightpence a mile, after Parliament had come to the solemn decision that they should pay a shilling a mile for riding slowly? We pause for a reply—and, having no chance of getting one, begin a fresh paragraph....