“The valetudinarian,” he writes, “is carried in a chair, betwixt the heels of a double row of horses, wincing under the curry-combs of grooms and postilions, over and above the hazard of being obstructed or overturned by the carriages which are continually making their exit or their entrance. I suppose, after some chairmen shall have been maimed, and a few lives lost by those accidents, the corporation will think in earnest about providing a more safe and commodious passage.... If, instead of the areas and iron rails, which seem to be of very little use, there had been a corridor with arcades all round, as in Covent Garden, the appearance of the whole would have been more magnificent and striking; those arcades would have afforded an agreeable covered walk, and sheltered the poor chairmen and their carriages from the rain, which is here almost perpetual. At present the chairs stand soaking in the open street from morning to night, till they become so many boxes of wet leather, for the benefit of the gouty and rheumatic, who are transported in them from place to place. Indeed, this is a shocking inconvenience, that extends over the whole city; and I am persuaded it produces infinite mischief to the delicate and infirm. Even the close chairs, contrived for the sick, by standing in the open air, have their fringe linings impregnated, like so many sponges, with the moisture of the atmosphere.” It was to Bath that Princess Amelia was carried in a sedan by eight chairmen from St. James’s, in April, 1728. This must easily have been the longest, and, so far as the chairmen were concerned, the most wearisome journey ever performed by a chair. [Illustration: “_The Social Pinch_” _By John Kay_] [Illustration: _Sedans in “The Present Age”_ _By L. P. Boitard_ (1767)] John Wilkes mentions in one of his letters to his daughter that he ascended Mont Cenis in a chair “carried by two men and assisted by four more.” “This,” he says, “was not a sedan chair, but a small wicker chair with two long poles; there is no covering of any kind to it.” Such open chairs seem to have been very uncommon, and were, I imagine, unknown in England. Some, however, had more glass than others, and their size fluctuated. Fashionable ladies must have found a difficulty in getting into a public chair of the ordinary size at the time of the large hoop petticoat, and there is a satiric print, dated 1733, which shows a lady thus attired, being hauled out through the opened roof of one with ropes and pulleys. Similarly, when forty or fifty years later the head-dress of the women became so enormous, a ludicrous print appeared showing a patent arrangement whereby the roof of a chair could be raised on rods to as great a height as was required.