And so late as 1770, the eccentric Lord Monboddo, who still maintained the superiority of a savage life, refused to “sit in a box drawn by brutes.” It is, of course, easy to magnify such opposition to coaches as followed on the grounds of mere luxury and display, but in the earlier history of the coach, to which we are now come, it is a factor which must by no means be neglected. The coach, like every other novelty, had to fight its way, and if one is inclined to believe, after reading such accusations as there are of the earliest coaches with their magnificent adornments and numerous attendants, that the owners altogether deserved the reproaches of their more Spartan fellows, it may be well to recall Macaulay’s words. In his sketch of the state of England in 1685, when coaches were still lavishly adorned, he says of them: “We attribute to magnificence what was really the effect of a very disagreeable necessity. People in the time of Charles the Second travelled with six horses, because with a smaller number there was great danger of sticking fast in the mire.” And what is true of 1685 is certainly true of 1585. Buckingham is supposed to have been the first man to use a coach and six in this country, though this is by no means certain. Of him a well-known story apropos of this question of undue luxury is told. “The stout old Earl of _Northumberland_,” it runs, “when he got loose, hearing that the great Favourite _Buckingham_ was drawn about with a Coach and six horses (which was wondered at then as a _novelty_, and imputed to him as a _mastring pride_) thought if _Buckingham_ had six he might very well have eight in his Coach, with which he rode through the City of _London_ to the _Bath_, to the vulgar talk and admiration.... Nor did this addition of two horses by _Buckingham_ grow higher than a little _murmur_. For in the late Queen’s time there were no coaches, and the first [had] but two Horses; the rest crept in by _Degrees_ as men at first venture to _sea_.”[18] Yet what may have been true of Buckingham, whose love of luxury was notorious, need not have been true of those other owners of coaches, who were constantly travelling about the country. Finally there is the other side of the question to be remembered, and, as M. Ramde quaintly points out in his _History of Locomotion_, the very luxury which people so disliked had a beneficent effect; for “after the development of the use of carriages, and their frequent employment by the court and nobility, the liberty to throw everything out of the window became intolerable! Thus the carriage of luxury has been the cause of cleanliness in the streets.”