At this date, and for some generations after, the custom was, when ladies traversed the city in carriages, for the gentlemen gallants to accompany them on horseback, riding in advance, or on each side. These formed a body-guard, not at all unnecessary or superfluous, looking to the swarms of "scourers," "knights of the road," and "goshawks" who made free warren of London streets and scrupled at no act of violence. The picture Gay has left us of the street ways in the beginning of the eighteenth century will form some estimate of what they were at an earlier period:-- "Where a dim gleam the paly lantern throws, O'er the mid pavement heapy rubbish grows, Or arched vaults their gaping jaws extend, Or the dark caves to common shores descend; Oft by the winds, extinct the signal dies, Or smothered in the glimmering socket lies. Ere night has half rolled round her ebon throne In the wide gulf, the shatter'd coach o'erthrown Sinks with the snorting steeds; the reins are broke, And from the crackling axle flies the spoke." The first hirable vehicles in London were the hackney-coaches, so called not from the village of Hackney, as commonly supposed, but from the old word "to hack," or let on hire. The first hackney-coaches were stout-built vehicles, fitted for the rough roads of the time; they made their appearance originally in 1625, and were kept at certain inns, where they had to be sent for when wanted, and these were only at this time twenty in number. In a proclamation issued by Charles I., in 1635, the King prohibited the general and promiscuous use of hackney-coaches in London, Westminster, and their suburbs, as being "not only a great disturbance to His Majesty, his dearest consort the Queen, the nobility, and others of place and degree, but the streets were so pestered and the pavements broken up that the common passage was thereby hindered." It was therefore commanded that "no hired coaches should be used in London except to travel three miles out of the same." Two years after the foregoing prohibition the King granted a licence for fifty hackney-coachmen in and about London and Westminster, to keep twelve horses each. This licence was extended to other cities and towns. In course of time the increase of street carriages called forth the indignation of Taylor the water-poet. What would that renowned king of scullers, whose wonted boast was that he had often ferried Shakspeare from Whitehall to Paris Garden, and Ben Jonson from Bankside to the Rose and Hope playhouses, have said had he lived in the present days? Probably the poor water rhymer would have drowned himself in his own element, or at least would have drowned his cares in a more spirited mixture. What a fearful picture did he draw of the calamity that assailed his trade!