In Edinburgh, however, where there were ninety chairs in 1738, the chairmen were Highlanders and rather more civil. “An inhabitant of Edinburgh,” says Hugh Arnot in his history of that city (1789), “who visits the metropolis can hardly suppress his laughter at seeing the awkward hobble of a street chair in the city of London.” We learn from Markland that in 1740 a chair in Edinburgh could be hired for four shillings a day or twenty shillings a week.[26] In London, according to George Selwyn, you could be carried three miles for a shilling.[27] In Edinburgh, again, where chairs were used at a later date than anywhere in England, rules were made for the public convenience in 1740, the most interesting of these being one which forbade a soldier in the service of the city guard to carry a chair at any time. By 1789 their numbers had increased to 238, including fifty privately owned. Scattered mention of them occurs amongst British authors. Steele, in one of his _Tatler_ papers, proposes to levy a tax upon them, and regrets that the sumptuary laws of the old Romans have never been revived. The chairmen, or “slaves of the rich,” he says, “take up the whole street, while we Peripatetics are very glad to watch an opportunity to whisk across a passage, very thankful that we are not run over for interrupting the machine, that carries in it a person neither more handsome, wise, nor valiant, than the meanest of us.” Matthew Bramble in _Humphrey Clinker_ is made to draw a wretched picture of the chairs which abounded in Bath at the middle of the century:—