Hobson senior had been a man of wealth and consideration, and his son increased both. In his father’s lifetime he had gone continually back and forth with the waggon, and so continued to go until his death, January 1st, 1631, in his eighty-sixth year. He was, as his father had been before him, not merely a carrier between Cambridge and London, but the only one, and specially licensed by the University. He conveyed the letters, too, and had a very lucrative business of letting out saddle-horses. In those days, before coaches had come into existence, and when able-bodied men, despising the slow progress of the waggon, rode horseback, his stable of forty horses, “fit for travelling, with boots, bridle, and whip, to furnish the gentlemen at once, without going from college to college to borrow,” was in great request. From his determination to allow no picking and choosing, and his refusing to allow any horse to be taken out of its proper turn, first arose that immortal proverb, “Hobson’s Choice, that or none”--in other words, no choice whatever. University witlings made great play with Hobson, and when at last he died, quite a sheaf of lyrical epitaphs on him appeared, from the well-known ones by Milton to the more obscure exercises of anonymous versifiers.[D] [D] For a detailed notice of Hobson, with a portrait of him, see the _Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road_, pp. 10–12, 32, 140, 157–166. The business of stage-waggoning obtained its first specific notice so late as 1617, when Fynes Morison, in his _Itinerary_, mentioned the “carryers, who have long covered waggons, in which they carry passengers from place to place; but this kind of journey is so tedious by reason they must take waggon very early and come very late to their innes, that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort.” How early they were accustomed to start, and how late would come to their inns, may be gathered from the great classic instance in Shakespeare, where the two carriers in the First Part of _King Henry the Fourth_ are discovered in the innyard at Rochester preparing to set forth for London. It is two o’clock in the morning, and London but thirty miles away, yet it will not be earlier than “time to go to bed with a candle” before that gammon of bacon and those two razes of ginger are delivered at Charing Cross. Shakespeare, of course, here wrote, not of the manners and customs of Henry the Fourth’s time, but of what he had himself heard and seen, and what might so be seen and heard on any day, early in the morning, in the yard of any considerable hostelry in the kingdom. He has fixed for ever, in his deathless pages, the road life that existed when the sixteenth century was drawing to its close.