On the stage, the gentlemen drivers, of whom the members of the Four-in-Hand Club were the exclusive _élite_, were illustrated rather than caricatured in _Goldfinch_, in Holcroft's comedy _The Road to Ruin_. Some of them who had not "drags" of their own, "tipped" a weekly allowance to stage coachmen, to allow them to "finger the ribbons," and "tool the team." Of course, they frequently "spilt" the passengers. The closeness with which the professional coachmen were imitated by the "bucks," is shown in the case of wealthy young Ackers, who had one of his front teeth taken out, in order that he might acquire the true coachman-like way of "spitting." There were men of brains, nevertheless, in the Four-in-Hand, who knew how to ridicule such fellow-members as Lord Onslow, whom they thus immortalized in an epigram of that day:-- "What can Tommy Onslow do? He can drive a coach and two! Can Tommy Onslow do no more? He can drive a coach and four." It is a curious fact, that the fashion of amateur charioteering was first set by the ladies. Dr. Young has strikingly sketched, in his satires, the Delia who was as good a coachman as the man she paid for being so:-- "Graceful as John, she moderates the reins, And whistles sweet her diuretic strains." The Four-in-Hand combined gastronomy with equestrianism and charioteering. They always drove out of town to dinner, and the ghost of Scrope Davies will pardon our suggesting that the club of drivers and diners might well have taken for their motto, "Quadrigis, petimus bene vivere!"[31] There is another version of the epigram on Tom Onslow:-- "Say, what can Tommy Onslow do? Can drive a curricle and two. Can Tommy Onslow do no more? Yes,--drive a curricle and four." This is the version current, we are told, among Onslow's relations in the neighbourhood of Guildford. Lord Onslow's celebrity as _a whip_ long preceded the existence of the Four-in-Hand Club (the palmy days of which belong to the times of George the Fourth), and it was not a _coach_, but a _phaeton_, that he drove. A correspondent of the _Athenæum_ writes: "I knew him personally, in my own boyhood, in Surrey, in the first years of the present century; and I remember then hearing the epigram now referred to, not as new, but as well known, in the following form:-- 'What can little T. O. do? Drive a phaeton and two. Can little T. O. do no more? Yes,--drive a phaeton and four.'