For further information concerning this period we naturally turn to Mr. Pepys, who patronised the hackney coach so frequently that when he was considering the propriety of setting up his own private carriage, he justified his decision to do so by the fact that “expense in hackney coaches is now so great.” Economy was not the only motive; on the contrary, this entry in his Diary appears to have been merely the salve to a conscience that reproached his vanity. In 1667 he confides more than once to the Diary that he is “almost ashamed to be seen in a hackney,” so much had his importance increased: and on July 10, 1668, he went “with my people in a glass hackney coach to the park, but was ashamed to be seen.” The private carriage he set up in December of that year will be referred to presently. The public conveyance available for hire in Pepys’ time was evidently a cumbrous but roomy conveyance; as when a great barrel of oysters “as big as sixteen others” was given him on March 16, 1664, he took it in the coach with him to Mr. Turner’s: a circumstance that suggests the vehicle was built with boots. No doubt many of these hackney carriages had formerly been the private property of gentlemen, which when old and shabby were sold cheaply to ply for hire in the streets. Coaches with boots were being replaced by the improved “glass coach” a few years later, and of course the relative merits of the old and new styles of vehicle were weighed by all who were in the habit of using hackney coaches. It was one of the old kind to which Pepys refers in the following passage:— August 23, 1667. “Then abroad to Whitehall in a hackney coach with Sir W. Pen, and in our way in the narrow street near Paul’s going the back way by Tower Street, and the coach being forced to put back, he was turning himself into a cellar [parts of London were still in ruins after the Great Fire], which made people cry out to us, and so we were forced to leap out—he out of one and I out of the other boote. _Query_, whether a glass coach would have permitted us to have made the escape?” Other objections to glass coaches appear in the following entry:— September 23, 1667. “Another pretty thing was my Lady Ashley speaking of the bad qualities of glass coaches, among others the flying open of the doors upon any great shake; but another was that my Lady Peterborough being in her glass coach with the glass up, and seeing a lady pass by in a coach whom she would salute, the glass was so clear that she thought it had been open, and so ran her head through the glass and cut all her forehead.” The usage of the time appears to have been for the driver of a hackney carriage to fill up his vehicle as he drove along the streets somewhat after the manner of a modern ‘bus conductor, if we correctly understand the following entry in the Diary:—