The doubt concerning the value of springs was shared in this country; for Mr. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, in his _Essay on the Construction of Roads and Carriages_ (1817), tells us that in 1768 he discovered that springs were as advantageous to horses as to passengers, and constructed a carriage for which the Society of English Arts and Manufactures presented him with a gold medal. In this carriage the axletrees were divided and the motion of each wheel was relieved by a spring. Travel in a springless coach over uneven streets and the roughest of roads could not have been a sufficiently luxurious mode of progress to lay the traveller open to charge of effeminacy. Taylor, the Water Poet, was no doubt biased in favour of the watermen, but he probably exaggerated little when he wrote, in 1605, of men and women “so tost, tumbled, jumbled and rumbled” in the coach of the time. THE FIRST HACKNEY COACHES. It was in the year 1605 that hackney coaches came into use; for several years these vehicles did not stand or “crawl” about the streets to be hired, but remained in the owners’ yards until sent for. In 1634 the first “stand” was established in London, as appears from a letter written by Lord Stafford to Mr. Garrard in that year:— “I cannot omit to mention any new thing that comes up amongst us though ever so trivial. Here is one Captain Bailey, he hath been a sea captain, but now lives on land about this city where he tries experiments. He hath created, according to his ability, some four hackney coaches, put his men into livery and appointed them to stand at the Maypole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rate to carry men into several parts of the town where all day they may be had. Other hackney men veering this way, they flocked to the same place and performed their journeys at the same rate so that sometimes there is twenty of them together which dispose up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had at the waterside.” Lord Stafford adds that everybody is much pleased with the innovation. It may here be said, on the authority of Fynes Morryson, who wrote in 1617, that coaches were not to be hired anywhere but in London at that time. All travel (save in the slow long waggons) was performed on horseback, the “hackney men”[4] providing horses at from 2½d. to 3d. per mile for those who did not keep their own. [4] See _Horses Past and Present_, by Sir Walter Gilbey, Bart. Vinton & Co., 1900. The number of coaches increased rapidly during the earlier part of the seventeenth century. EXCESSIVE NUMBER OF COACHES IN LONDON.