Nor did stage-coaches immediately change this time-honoured way of getting about the country, for there existed an aristocratic prejudice against using public vehicles. Offensive persons who never owned carriages of their own were used to give themselves insufferable airs when journeying by coach, and hint, for the admiration or envy of their fellow-passengers, that an accident had happened to their own private equipage. Satirists of the time soon seized upon this contemptible resort of the snob, and used it to advantage in contemporary literature. Thus we find the committeeman’s wife in Sir Robert Howard’s comedy explaining her presence in the Reading coach to be owing to her own carriage being disordered, adding that if her husband knew she had been obliged to ride in the stage he would “make the house too hot to hold some.” Here and there we find exceptions to this general rule. In the coach passing through Preston in 1662, one Parker was fellow-traveller with “persons of great qualitie, such as knightes and ladyes”; and on one occasion in 1682 the winter coach on its four days’ journey between Nottingham and London had for passenger Sir Ralph Knight, of Langold, Yorks; but the single gentlemen in good health continued for years after the introduction of stage-coaches to go on horseback, and when their families came to town they usually took the family chariot, and either contracted with stable-keepers for horses on the way, or else, taking their most powerful horses from the plough, harnessed four or six of them to their private vehicle, and so, with the driving of their best ploughman, came to the capital in state, much to the amusement of the fashionables of Piccadilly and St. James’s. We must, however, suppose, from the fury of Cresset’s _Reasons for Suppressing Stage Coaches_, of 1662, that some of the less energetic among the country gentlemen had already succumbed to the discreditable practice of travelling in them. In his pages we learn something of what a horseman’s life on the road was like, and what he escaped by taking to the coach. The hardy race became soft and grievously enervated by the unwonted luxury; their muscles slackened, and they developed an infirmity of purpose that rendered them no longer able to “endure frost, snow, or rain, or to lodge in the fields”--trifling inconveniences and incidents of travel which, it appears, they had previously been accustomed to support with that cheerfulness or resignation with which one faces the inevitable and incurable.