It was not until quite late in the coaching era that proprietors began generally to adopt the practice of naming their coaches. In early days there was little or no occasion to do so, for when there were only two or three coaches on the most frequented roads, no difficulty existed in distinguishing between them. One might be the old original stage; another, somewhat better built and more up-to-date, would be the “Machine”; another yet, fastest of all, the “Fly,” or the “Flying Machine.” The earliest named coach of which we have any record was the “Confatharrat” London and Norwich stage, mentioned in 1695. As we have already seen in these pages, this was an old-time way of spelling the word “Confederate,” and the coach was one probably owned and run by a syndicate, who shared the risks and the profits. Before competing coaches began to multiply and hustle one another in the struggle for public support, proprietors were content to announce “a coach,” or “a stage-coach,” to run, and took no trouble to characterise their vehicle in any more attractive fashion. But when an opposition took the road, the vehicles so curtly named became “commodious,” “easy,” “elegant,” and anything else you like in the commendatory kind. The next stage in this development was to appeal to the sentiment of old customers and to endeavour to retain their favour, not usually by increased speed, lower fares, or better accommodation, but by describing an old-established coach as “the original.” Passengers, who did not lay so much stress upon sentiment as upon personal comfort, were generally well-advised to book seats by the new opposition coaches rather than by the “originals,” which had the defect of being old-fashioned, and perhaps, in many cases, worn out. Surely in no other business was rivalry so bitter and unrelenting as in that of coaching, and the annals of the road afford occasion for a sigh or a smile as one reads the furious denunciations levelled by one coach-master against another in their old advertisements. This contention started in the very first years of the Brighton Road. In 1757 James Batchelor extended his old Lewes stage to Brighthelmstone (as Brighton then was known). He took two days to perform the journey. Five years later appeared a certain J. Tubb, allied in partnership with S. Brawne, with intent to drive Batchelor off the road. They advertised, in May 1762, a “Lewes and Brighthelmstone Flying Machine, hung on steel springs, very neat and commodious,” to do the journey in one day. This presumption aroused Batchelor, the old incumbent, to extraordinary energy, for, the very next week, he started a “new large Flying Chariot,” and--reduced his fares! This reduction of fares seems to have struck Mr. Tubb as an exceedingly mean and contemptible move, and he rushed into print with a very long and virulent advertisement in the _Lewes Journal_, desiring “Gentlemen, Ladies, and others” to “look narrowly into the Meanness