Nicholas Rothwell, of the London and Warwick stage in 1694, reappears in an extremely interesting broadsheet advertisement of 1731, announcing that the “Birmingham stage-coach in two days and a half begins, May the 24th.” Although we have no earlier information of this coach, it is probably safe to assume that this, like the advertisement of the York coach already quoted, merely advertised the beginning of a new season, and that winter was still largely, as it had been seventy-six years before, a blank in the coaching world. Rothwell was evidently established at Warwick, and seems to have been the first notable coach-proprietor, the forerunner of the Chaplins, Nelsons, Mountains, Shermans and Ibbersons of a later age. By his old advertisement we see that he catered for all classes of travellers--by stage-coach, private carriage, chaise, and waggon--and that he hired out horses to the gentlemen who still preferred their own company and the saddle to the coach and its miscellaneous strangers. Even the dead were not beyond the consideration of Mr. Rothwell, whose “Hearse, with Mourning Coach and Able Horses,” is set forth to “go to any part of Great Britain, at reasonable Rates.” Unhappily for the historian eager to reconstruct the road life of those times, this old advertisement is almost all that survives to tell us of Rothwell, and fortunate we are to have even that, for such sheets, as commonplace when issued as the advertisements of railway excursions are at the present time, are now of extreme rarity. It would appear, from the rude woodcut illustrating Rothwell’s bill, that his coach was of the old type, hung on leather straps and quite innocent of springs--the kind of coach that Parson Adams, in Fielding’s _Joseph Andrews_, outwalked without the slightest difficulty. It seems to be more up-to-date in the matter of windows, and to be a “glass-coach,” if we may judge by the appearance of the window at which the solitary and unhappy-looking passenger is standing in an attitude suggestive of stomachic disturbance. There are no windows in the upper quarters of the coach, which in that and some other respects greatly resembles the vehicle pictured in 1747 by Hogarth in his _Inn Yard_. [Illustration: THE STAGE-COACH, 1783. _After Rowlandson._ ]