“We set out at six in the morning to go to Petworth, and did not get out of the coaches (save only when we were overturned or stuck fast in the mire) till we arrived at our journey’s end. ’Twas hard service for the prince to sit fourteen hours in the coach that day without eating anything and passing through the worst ways that I ever saw in my life; we were thrown but once indeed in going, but both our coach, which was the leading, and his highnesse’s body-coach would have suffered very often if the nimble boors of Sussex had not frequently poised it or supported it with their shoulders from Goldalmin almost to Petworth; and the nearer we approached to the Duke’s house the more unaccessible it seemed to be. The last nine miles of the way cost us six hours’ time to conquer them, and indeed we had never done it if our good master had not several times lent us a pair of horses out of his own coach, whereby we were enabled to trace out the way for him.” After reading such an account, it is difficult to understand why any one preferred coach to horseback on a cross-country journey. No wonder Gay was goaded to ask:— “Who can recount the coach’s various harms, The legs disjointed, and the broken arms?” “In the wide gulph,” he says in another place, “the shatter’d coach o’erthrown Sinks with the snorting steeds; the reins are broke, And from the crackling axle flies the spoke.” Yet, according to Swift, Gay was not so averse to the coach in his later years. Writing to him in 1731, the Dean says:— “If your ramble was on horseback, I am glad of it on account of your health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between stage-coaches and friends’ coaches: for you are as arrant a cockney as any hosier in Cheapside.... You love twelve-penny coaches too well, without considering that the interest of a whole thousand pounds brings you but half a crown a day.” “A coach and six horses,” he goes on to say in another letter, “is the utmost exercise you can bear, and this only when you can fill it with such company as is best suited to avoid your taste, and how glad would you be if it could waft you in the air to avoid jolting.”