been obliged to get out and walk, or to have again resorted to the use of the sedan-chair, in which, before he had set up a carriage, he was used to be carried, greatly to the indignation of the populace, to whom sedan-chairs were at that time novelties. “The clamour and the noise of it was so extravagant,” we are told, “that the people would rail upon him in the streets, loathing that men should be brought to as servile a condition as horses.” Yet no one ever thought of denouncing Buckingham or any other of the magnificos when they lolled in easy seats under the silken hangings of their state barges and were rowed by the labour of a dozen lusty oarsmen on the Thames. The work was as servile as the actual carrying of a passenger, but the innate conservatism of mankind could not at first perceive this. On the whole, Buckingham therefore has our sympathy. The most innocent doings of a favourite with Royalty are capable of being twisted into haughty and malignant acts, and had it not been for Buckingham’s position at Court his displays would not have brought him the hatred of the people and the rivalry of his own order which they certainly did arouse. The Earl of Northumberland was one of those who were thus goaded into the rivalry of display. Hearing that the favourite had six horses to his carriage, he thought that he might very well have eight, “and so rode,” we are told, “from London to Bath, to the vulgar talk and admiration.” The first public carriages, according to a statement made to Taylor, the “water poet,” by Old Parr, the centenarian, were the “hackney-coaches,” established in London in 1605. “Since then,” says Taylor, writing on the subject at different times between 1623 and 1635, “coaches have increased with a mischief, and have ruined the trade of the watermen by hackney-coaches, and now multiply more than ever.” The “watermen” were, of course, those who plied with their boats and barges for hire upon the Thames, chiefly between London and Westminster, the river being then, and for long after, the principal highway for traffic in the metropolis. So greatly, indeed, was the river traffic for the time affected, that the sprack-witted Taylor relinquished his trade of waterman and embarked upon the more promising career of pamphleteering. “Thirty years ago,” he says, in one of these outbursts, “The World runnes on Wheeles,” “coaches were few”:-- Then upstart helcart coaches were to seeke, A man could scarce see twenty in a weeke, But now I thinke a man may daily see More than the whirries on the Thames can be. Carroches, coaches, jades and Flanders mares Doe rob us of our shares, our wares, our fares; Against the ground we stand and knock our heeles, Whilest all our profit runs away on wheeles.