The harassed coach-proprietors, or those who still existed, were properly grateful for the reduction made, for it just turned the scale in many coaching accounts, and so kept on those public conveyances where otherwise they would have been commercially impossible. The railway magnates, who had by that time become a power in the land, could afford to influence the Government in favour of these concessions, for the coaches had already been driven off the direct routes, and were no longer formidable competitors of the locomotive. They had, indeed, become merely feeders to the victorious railways. CHAPTER IX THE EARLY COACHMEN When stage-coachmen are mentioned, the mind at once flies to Mr. Tony Weller, a stout man with a red face and a hoarse voice proceeding from the depths of capacious shawls in which his throat is muffled. Such was the typical coachman at any time between the introduction of coaches and 1820, when a leaven of smartness and gentility began to be noticeable, and the time-honoured type to fade away. Coachmen were generally fat for the same reason that postboys were thin: it was a necessity of their occupation. The postboys bumped their flesh away on horseback, but the coachman’s sedentary occupation, and still more a tremendous capacity for drinking induced by the open-air life, caused him to accumulate fat to an immoderate degree. The typical coachman is pictured in Hood’s ballad of John Day, who was the biggest man, Of all the coachman kind, With back too broad to be conceived By any narrow mind. But while it would probably be safe to declare, without fear of contradiction, that there never was such a thing as a fat postboy, it would be the very height of rashness to say that a lean coachman was unknown. There were many such, but the traditional coachman was a bulky person, helped up to his seat by the combined efforts of the stable-helpers; and Dickens, in picturing Tony Weller, fell in with the public humour, although already the type was become somewhat out of date.