Many among those not born in the age of coaches have marvelled at what they consider the wealth of reminiscences about the old coachmen. The truth is that there exists no such wealth. There were certainly no fewer than three thousand coachmen throughout the country in the days just before railways. What do we know of them? Very little. Even their names have been forgotten, except in some (comparatively few) special cases. No one can give us a complete list of the coachmen of the Edinburgh Mail, of the Exeter “Telegraph,” or Devonport “Quicksilver,” or of any of the crack day coaches. Nearly complete in some cases, but never quite, because the reminiscent travellers by famous mail or stage have never troubled to detail such things; caring only to narrate the peculiarly bad or good coachmanship, as the case might be, or the eccentricities in manner or dress, of the men who drove them. The merely efficient coachman, with no salient characteristics to be described enthusiastically or spitefully caricatured, stood little chance of notice in print. He drove until the natural end of his career came, or until it was cut short by the railway; and in either case ended obscurely. On the other hand, the noted masters of the art of driving a coach, who taught the young bloods that accomplishment, or who were excellent companions with joke and song to while the hours away, have found abundant notice; and they are the chronicles of these men that make that apparent wealth of reminiscence. The coachmen ended, as may be supposed, very variously. A generation ago, many of the city and suburban omnibuses were driven by gloomy, purple-faced men, confirmed misanthropes, who viewed the world with jaundiced eyes, and, living in vivid recollection of the past, despised themselves, their omnibuses, and the people they drove. Those were the old coachmen. The Richmond Conveyance Company, whose omnibuses in the ’sixties conveyed many Londoners between the “Goose and Gridiron,” St. Paul’s Churchyard, and that famous riverside town, employed a number of old-time coachmen, who wore tall hats with a gold band, and were never tired of telling their box-seat passengers about the open-handedness of the passengers of old, and incidentally that travellers by ’bus were “not worth a d----n”; not, perhaps, a tactful or ingratiating manner, but “out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.” [Illustration: THE DRIVER, 1852. _After H. Alken._ ]