There were no smart coachmen before the introduction of mail-coaches. Before coaches carried the mails and the drivers became, in a sense, officials and persons of importance, wreathed around with a vague atmosphere of authority, your average driver took no sort of pride in himself. Nor, supposing the existence of one who fared the roads in smart attire, could he for long have kept so gay and debonair an appearance. The meagreness and uncertainty of his livelihood forbade it, and if those factors had been eliminated, there still remained the unutterable badness of the roads to discourage him, together with the longer spells of driving that these earlier men knew, which wearied them and rendered them careless of details. Thus the stage-drivers of the era that preceded the classic age of the road wore clumsy hay-bands round their legs to protect them from the cold, and, together with their many layers of clothing, their top-boots encrusted with the mud of a month’s journeys, and their general air of untidiness, were figures of fun, in sharp contrast with their brethren of a later day, who were certain of their employment, of their liberal and frequent tips, of good roads exceedingly well kept, and of their coaches and cattle being maintained in the pink of condition by a small army of stable-hands and helpers. The poor old fellows of a bygone age wore perhaps nothing but fold upon fold of “comforters” round their necks, while their linen did not bear inspection. The flower of the coaching age, on the other hand--the coachmen of the first quarter of the nineteenth century--wore the gayest and the neatest neckties as a finish to a neat and striking professional costume. They were artists alike in the management of their horses and in the folding of a tie. Never a journey but they had a posy in their buttonhole, and never an occasion when they were not spotlessly clean, in linen, top-boots, and costume generally. It was an unmistakable costume, and one familiar to us nowadays in its revival by modern coaching enthusiasts. Box-cloth coats, fearfully and wonderfully stitched in five or six rows, and decorated with buttons of an enormous size, together with white beaver hats, were the most outstanding items of this marvellous costume.