However that may have been, and although to Palmer the patent coach of Besant may have seemed altogether admirable, there were many who condemned it and its patent springs. It is apparently one of this type that is pictured by Dalgety in his print of St. George’s Circus, dated 1797. It is curious and interesting, as showing a transition between the old type of coach and a style yet to come. The fore boot is of the old detached type, but the wickerwork basket behind is discarded, and a hind boot may be observed, framed to the body. The coach is hung very high, and suspended at the back from iron or steel arms of the pump-handle kind. This seems to be the type criticised so severely by Matthew Boulton, himself an engineer, in 1798, when, describing a mail-coach trip from London to Exeter, he roundly condemned the patent springs:-- “I had the most disagreeable journey I ever experienced the night after I left you, owing to the new improved patent coach, a vehicle loaded with iron trappings and the greatest complication of unmechanical contrivances jumbled together, that I have ever witnessed. The coach swings sideways, with a sickly sway, without any vertical spring; the point of suspense bearing upon an arch called a spring, though it is nothing of the sort. The severity of the jolting occasioned me such disorder that I was obliged to stop at Axminster and go to bed very ill. However, I was able to proceed next day in a post-chaise. The landlady in the ‘London Inn’ at Exeter assured me that the passengers who arrived every night were in general so ill that they were obliged to go supperless to bed; and unless they go back to the old-fashioned coach, hung a little lower, the mail-coaches will lose all their custom.” Some debated points respecting the early mails are cleared up in a series of replies by Palmer to questions put by the French Post Office in 1791, respecting the English mail-coach system. “What,” asks M. de Richebourg, “is a Mail-coach?” and among other details we learn that “it is constructed to carry four Inside Passengers only, and One Outside Passenger, who rides with the Coachman.” Here we perceive the beginning of the outsides. Then the question is asked: “When there are no Travellers on the Mail-coaches, do they put-to the same number of Horses as when there are?” To this the answer was: “They are all drove with four Horses, sometimes, in Snow and very bad weather, with Six;--never less than four, whether they have Passengers or not.” This disposes of the statements made that the early mails were two-horsed. CHAPTER VII THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1800–1824