A sharp distinction was drawn between London and provincial coachmen, and between coachmen on main roads and those on by-ways. Yorkshire by-roads, in particular, were regarded by coaching critics, from Nimrod downwards, with contempt, alike for their coaches and coachmen. Thus, one tells in 1830 of a dirty coach in Yorkshire, drawn by a team of “tike” horses known to the coachman by the names of Rumbleguts and Bumblekite, Staggering Bob and Davey. On the cross-roads of that many-acred shire the coachmen changed with every stage, and cleaned and harnessed their own horses. They were, in fact, in those remote parts, a hundred years behind the age, and one might in the nineteenth century have studied the manners and customs of the early eighteenth. The same thing was noticed by Hawker in 1812, on the Glasgow and Carlisle road, where the stage-coachmen resembled “a set of dirty gipsies,” driving but one stage each, and then looking after their horses. Those country hands were not in general very great respecters of rank or station. The London coachmen were civil, had a peculiar humour about them, and did not consider themselves _quite_ the equal of the box-seat passenger who sat beside them; but the provincial performer poked one in the ribs when he wanted to say anything, and perhaps nearly ejected one from the box by his “knowing” jerk of the elbow when he considered emphasis necessary to point his remarks. The old six-inside coaches survived here long after they had been forgotten in most other parts of the country, often driven by a coachman as comfortable as a “drop” of gin could make him, and drawn by horses as weak as the water he forgot to put into his last tumbler. In such an ominous combination, the passengers involuntarily repeated the prayer in the Litany for “all travellers by land.” Drunken coachmen are heard of in the old coaching annals, and accidents caused by them when in that state stand on record, but they are comparatively few. It was not so easy a matter to make a seasoned coachman--even one of only a few years’ experience--drunk. The capacity of coachmen for drink was marvellous. As throwing some light upon it, a meeting with Harry Ward at the “White Hart,” Andover, may be instanced. He was then on the famous “Quicksilver” Devonport Mail. On this occasion it was a cold winter’s night, and Ward was waiting for the “Quicksilver” to come up, and to take his stage. “How many brandys-and-water does that make to-day?” asked a passenger who had just stood him one, hot. “This is the twentieth,” replied Ward. (A glass of brandy-and-water then cost 1s.) He was not regarded by his contemporaries as an intemperate man, and was never known to be the worse for drink; but he felt called upon to explain those twenty glasses, and said, “You soon get it blown out of you, crossing Salisbury Plain.”