The period at which this chapter begins is that when outside passengers were first enabled to ride on the roofs of coaches without incurring the imminent hazard of being thrown off whenever their vigilance and their anxious grip were relaxed. It was about 1800 that fore and hind boots, framed to the body of the coach, became general, thus affording foothold to the outsides. Mail-coaches were not the cause of this change, for they originally carried no passengers on the roof. We cannot fix the exact date of this improvement, and may suppose that, in common with every other innovation, it was gradual, and only introduced when new coaches became necessary on the various routes. The immediate result was to democratise coach-travelling. Exclusive insides, who once with disgust observed the occasional soldier or sailor dangling his legs in the windows, now were obliged to put up with a set of cheap travellers who, if they did no longer so dangle their common legs, being provided with seats and footholds, were always to be found on the roof, laughing and talking loudly, enjoying themselves in the elementary and vociferous way only possible to low persons, and disturbing the genteel reflections of the insides. Let us pity the sorrows of those superior travellers, unwillingly conscious of those stamping, noisy, low-down creatures on the roof! The revulsion of those sensitive persons led to the establishment of a superior class of coach, carrying insides only; and accordingly, we find the original improvement of seats on the roof bringing far-reaching consequences in its train. While democratising coaches, it at the same time necessitated another class, and thus directly brought about a numerical increase. The exclusive were thus enabled to keep their exclusiveness by going in such conveyances as that announced in the advertising columns of the high-class papers:-- FOR PORTSMOUTH. _A New Carriage on Springs, called_ THE LAND FRIGATE, Sets out from the _Bell Savage_, Ludgate Hill, to the _Red Lyon_ at Portsmouth, every Tuesday and Saturday, at 6 a.m. Fare, 15s. each Passenger. Ladies and Gentlemen are requested to Observe that the Frigate is elegantly sashed all round, and in order to preserve the gentility and respectability of the vehicle, no outside passengers are carried. [Illustration: MRS. BUNDLE IN A RAGE; OR, TOO LATE FOR THE STAGE. _After Rowlandson, 1809._ ] The period now under consideration was in other ways a very great and progressive one. In this space of twenty-five years were included the two most significant advances in the whole history of the road--the introduction about 1805 of springs under the driving-box, and the shortening of the stages. Without either of them, the acceleration that resulted in the Golden Age of coaching, beginning in 1825, would have been impossible.