Rothwell’s coach is drawn by four horses in hand, with a postilion on the off horse of a couple of extra leaders. The practice of using six horses and a postilion is one to which we find allusion in Fielding’s _Joseph Andrews_, written nine years later than the date of this Birmingham coach. The curious will find the description in the twelfth chapter of that novel, where Joseph, recovering from the murderous attack of two highwaymen, attracts the attention of the postilion of a passing stage-coach. “The postilion, hearing a man’s groans, stopped his horses, and told the coachman he was certain there was a dead man lying in the ditch, for he heard him groan.” (That postilion surely was an Irishman.) “‘Go on, sirrah!’ says the coachman: ‘we are confounded late, and have no time to look after dead men.’ A lady, who heard what the postilion said, and likewise heard the groan, called eagerly to the coachman to stop and see what was the matter. Upon which, he bid the postilion alight and look into the ditch. He did so, and returned, ‘That there was a man sitting upright, as naked as ever he was born.’ ‘O J--sus!’ cried the lady; ‘a naked man! Dear coachman, drive on and leave him!’” Rowlandson shows that in 1783 six horses were still used, and that a postilion continued to ride one of the leaders. It was about this same period that the generally misquoted remark about the ease of driving a coach-and-six through an Act of Parliament grew proverbial. It had originated so early as 1689, when Sir Stephen Rice, Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer and a bigoted Papist, declared for James the Second, and was often heard to say he would drive a coach and six horses through the Act of Settlement. Later generations, knowing nothing of six horses to a coach, and unused to seeing more than four, unconsciously adapted the saying to the practice of their own times. CHAPTER IV GROWTH OF COACHING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY