Warde’s driving was by no means in the later style, and he probably would have been very much out of his element with the smart galloping teams of the Golden Age. He was, however, of those who were fit to be trusted with a heavy load behind weak horses and on bad roads. There was a peculiarity about him as regarded the driving of his own horses which the history of the road, it was said, could not parallel. Let the journey be in length what it might, he never took the horses out of his private coach, giving them only now and then a little hay and a mouthful of water at a roadside public-house. When he resided in Northamptonshire, sixty-three miles from London, the journey was always accomplished by his team “at a pull,” as he called it. The pace, as may be supposed, was not quick. John Warde was one of the founders of the B.D.C., or Benson Driving Club, in 1807. Amateur coaching, as a fashionable amusement, took its rise on the Brighton Road. Looked upon with contempt by stalwart and bluff Warde and his kind, it nevertheless grew and flourished in the hands of the Barrymores and their contemporaries, Sir John Lade and Colonel Mellish; and in the early years of the nineteenth century the education of no gay young blood was complete until he had acquired the art of driving four-in-hand, in addition to the already fashionable and highly dashing sport of driving the light whiskies, the high-perched curricles, and the toppling tilburies that then gave a fearful joy to the newly-fledged whip. There was not too much physical exertion, endurance, or skill required on the road to Brighton, which was only fifty-two miles in length, and already possessed a better surface than most roads out of London; and, moreover, it was a road peopled from beginning to end with fashionables, before whom the gentleman-coachman could display his prowess. It was then pretty generally recognised that coach-driving was a poor sport if the ease and grace of the performer could not be displayed before a large and fashionable audience. That, it will be conceded, was not altogether a worthy attitude. Many of these brilliant amateurs of the road ran an essentially identical career of viciousness and mad extravagance; and not a few of them wasted themselves and their substance in the very shady pursuits that then characterised the “man about town.” Those who are curious about such things may find them fully set forth in Pierce Egan’s _Life in London_ and its grim sequel, the _Finish_. The endings of the Toms and Jerrys of that Corinthian age were generally sordid and pitiful. [Illustration: FOUR-IN-HAND. _After G. H. Laporte._ ]