You may learn more of the English seventeenth-century carriages from Pepys than from any other writer; nor is this a matter for wonder. Pepys had a knack of knowing just exactly what posterity would desire to know. From his Diary, we learn incidentally that the watermen were still endeavouring to regain their lost prestige and custom, but by this time coaches had enormously increased in number—in 1662 there were nearly 2500 hackneys in London alone—and thenceforth they are hardly heard of. To be any one, moreover, you had to have your private coach. Doctors, for instance, found it very well worth their while to keep a coach, though, as Sir Thomas Browne told his son, they were certainly “more for state than for businesse.” On the other hand those who were well able to keep a private carriage occasionally preferred the use of a hackney, and sometimes at times when they had no business to do so. Mr. Pepys, with clear ideas upon the dignity and responsibilities of rank, was indignant at any such foolery. He was told, he recalls in one place, “of the ridiculous humour of our King and Knights of the Garter the other day, who, whereas heretofore their robes were only to be worn during their ceremonies and service, these, as proud of their coats, did wear them all day till night, and then rode into the Park with them on. Nay, and he tells us he did see my Lord Oxford and Duke of Monmouth in a hackney-coach with two footmen in the Park, with their robes on; which is a most scandalous thing, so as all gravity may be said to be lost amongst us.” The private coach, too, was the last luxury to be given up after financial embarrassment. So we have Lady Flippant, in Wycherley’s _Love in a Wood_, saying, “Ah, Mrs. Joyner, nothing grieves me like the putting down my coach! For the fine clothes, the fine lodgings,—let ’em go; for a lodging is as unnecessary a thing to a widow that has a coach, as a hat to a man that has a good peruke. For, as you see about town, she is most probably at home in her coach:—she eats, and drinks, and sleeps in her coach; and for her visits, she receives them in the playhouse.” No lady’s virtue, according to this cynical dramatist, was proof against a coach and six. At the time of the introduction of the light, two-seated chariots, ordinary private coaches were also changing in shape. In Charles I’s reign they had been both very long and very wide; in his son’s time they became much slenderer and less unwieldy. Alterations in this direction were possibly suggested by the ubiquitous and most convenient sedans, and, indeed, there is an allusion to this change of shape in Sir William Davenant’s _First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House_, in which, during a dialogue between a Russian and a Londoner, the foreigner says: “I have now left your houses, and am passing through your streets; but not in a coach, for they are uneasily hung, and so narrow that I took them for sedans upon wheels.”