An admiring critic of coaching in its last decade enlarged with great satisfaction upon the complete dissimilarity between the modern “artists” and the “workmen” of old time. Their change of character and appearance had kept pace with the improvements in the different points of their profession. No longer did one see the dram-drinking, gin-consuming, jolly-looking rotundities of yore. Instead of those honest, wet old souls, the “ribbons” were handled by pinks of perfection, turned out at all points like gentlemen, and in character also like gentlemen, tasting nothing but their glass of sherry from end to end of a journey. [Illustration: THE OLD “PRINCE OF WALES” BIRMINGHAM COACH. _After H. Alken._ ] But side by side with these improvements upon the old order came what were known to our grandfathers as the “flash men,” who, at the extremity of ill-assumed gentility, were probably more objectionable than the rough-and-ready old fellows of an earlier generation. The flash coachman flourished very rankly indeed at Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, and other great commercial centres. He always dressed in the extreme of fashion, and perhaps a little in advance of it. His silken stock was swathed higher up his neck, his gold (or gilded) scarf-pin was bigger, his waistcoat had a more alarming pattern, his hat was more curly in the brim than others, and in his conversation and manners he dotted the “i’s” and crossed the “t’s” of his betters. He was, in fact, an unconscious caricature of those among the upper classes who took an interest in the road, and was a very loud, insufferable and offensive person, who, it was said, “had a missus at both ends,” smoked a dozen real Havanahs in a hundred miles, and hardly thanked you for half a crown. Such men imposed upon many of the good commercial folks of those trading towns who were foolish enough and inexperienced enough to take cigar-smoking for superiority and overdressed insolence for the hallmark of gentility; and these fellows became, in consequence, the curse of the roads. Borrow has, in his _Romany Rye_, a very vigorous chapter on their kind, but errs in so far as he seems to consider that they, and they only, formed the “stage-coachmen of England.”