Even more than the passengers, coach-proprietors dreaded amateur coachmen, and very properly dismissed those professionals whom they caught allowing the reins out of their charge. They had cause for this dread, for not only was the act of allowing amateurs to drive itself an illegal one, entailing penalties, but it often resulted in accidents, bringing in their train very heavy compensation claims. Juries invariably satisfied themselves as to whether a professional or an amateur was driving at the time when an accident occurred, and assessed damages accordingly. Sir St. Vincent Cotton was the cause of a serious accident that happened to the “Star of Cambridge.” Springing the horses over a favourable stretch of galloping-ground, he went at such a reckless pace that Jo Walton, the professional coachman, seized hold of the reins. In doing so the coach was overturned, and the passengers severely injured. A jockey named Calloway had his leg broken, and, with others, brought an action for damages. The affair cost Robert Nelson and his partners nearly two thousand pounds. A good amateur coachman was, as a general rule, like an accomplished violinist, only to be produced by long training. Caught young and properly schooled, he might become an elegant as well as a thorough whip; but the late-comer rarely attained both grace and complete mastery. “He who would master this most fascinating science of coachmanship,” says Dashwood, in the _New Sporting Magazine_, “must begin early, under good tuition. He must work constantly on all kinds of coaches, and, thereby accustoming himself to every description of team to be met with, no matter how difficult or unpleasant, will ere long acquire a practical knowledge on that all-important point, the art of putting horses well together.” He then proceeds to sigh for one hour of “old Bill Williams,” of the “Oxford Defiance,” who, as a schoolmaster of gentlemen-aspirants to coaching honours was, in his time, unequalled. He was supposed to have turned out more efficient coachmen than all the rest of his brethren put together. “Never by any chance--confound him!--would he allow an error or ungraceful act to escape unnoticed, and I have often got off his box so annoyed at his merciless reproofs and lectures that I vowed no power on earth should make me touch another rein for him. The first morning, in particular, that I was with him I shall never forget. In spite of all my remonstrances, nothing would satisfy him but I must take the reins from the door of the very office, at the ‘Belle Sauvage,’ he himself getting up behind, in order, as he said, not to ‘fluster the young ‘un.’ By great good luck we got pretty well into the street, and, without anything worth telling, for some way past Temple Bar; but, as my evil star would have it, the narrow part of the Strand was uncommonly full, and having rather an awkward team, and being moreover in a pretty particular stew, we had more than one squeak at sundry