There are, at the present day, many old people who remember and speak with affection of the old hackney-coach. They admit that it was a lumbering thing, and that the horses were generally sorry specimens fully qualified for the knacker’s yard; but they add, emphatically, that no vehicles now plying for hire in the streets of London can compare with it for cosiness and comfort. It was furnished luxuriously, and was as comfortable as a hammock, even when travelling on roads that would shake a modern cab to pieces before it had journeyed half a mile. Hackney-coaches were established in London early in the seventeenth century, and soon became so well patronised that, in 1623, the Thames watermen, who had long enjoyed the monopoly of carrying the public, became alarmed and complained loudly that they were being ruined. Apparently they wished the hackney-coaches to be suppressed, but the new vehicles were far too popular to be treated in that fashion. John Taylor, the waterman-poet, bewailed their introduction in a pamphlet entitled, “The world run on wheels.” He did not denounce private coaches, his anger being aroused “only against the caterpillar swarm of hirelings. They have undone my poor trade whereof I am a member: and though I look for no reformation yet I expect the benefit of an old proverb, ‘Give the losers leave to speak.’... This infernal swarm of trade-spellers have so overrun the land that we can get no living upon the water; for I dare truly affirm that in every day in any term, especially if the Court be at Whitehall, they do rob us of our livings and carry 500 fares daily from us.” “I have heard,” he continued, “of a gentlewoman who sent her man to Smithfield from Charing Cross to hire a coach to carry her to Whitehall; another did the like from Ludgate Hill to be carried to see a play at Blackfriars.” One is tempted to believe that Taylor was exaggerating in the hope of checking by ridicule the growing fashion for hackney-coach riding. “It is,” he declared in the same pamphlet, “a most uneasy kind of passage in coaches on the paved streets of London, wherein men and women are so tost, tumbled, jumbled, rumbled, and crossing of kennels, dunghills, and uneven ways.”