They lash the manners of the Regency, and think they are dealing out punishment to a bygone state of things; but human nature is the same in all centuries. The fact is so obvious that one is ashamed to state it. The Regency was a terrible time for gambling; but Tranby Croft had a similar repute when Edward the Seventh was Prince of Wales. Bridge is a fine game, and what, think you, supports the evening newspapers? The news? Certainly: the Betting News. Cock-fighting was a brutal sport, and is now illegal, but is it dead? Oh dear, no. Virtue was not general in the picturesque times of George the Fourth. Is it now? Study the Cause Lists of the Divorce Courts. Worse offences are still punished by law, but are later condoned or explained by Society as an eccentricity. Society a hundred years ago did not plumb such depths. In short, behind the surface of things, the Regency riot not only exists, but is outdone, and Tom and Jerry, could they return, would find themselves very dull dogs indeed. It is all the doing of the middle classes, that the veil is thrown over these things. In times when the middle class and the Nonconformist Conscience traditionally lived at Clapham, it mattered comparatively little what excesses were committed; but that class has so increased that it has to be subdivided into Upper and Lower, and has Claphams of its own everywhere. It is--or they are--more wealthy than before, and they read things, you know, and are a power in Parliament, and are something in the dominie sort to those other classes above and below. III [Sidenote: SOCIETY: THEN AND NOW] The coaching and waggoning history of the road to Brighthelmstone (as it then was called) emerges dimly out of the formless ooze of tradition in 1681. In De Laune's "Present State of Great Britain," published in that year, in the course of a list of carriers, coaches, and stage-waggons in and out of London, we find Thomas Blewman, carrier, coming from "Bredhempstone" to the "Queen's Head," Southwark, on Wednesdays, and, setting forth again on Thursdays, reaching Shoreham the same day: which was remarkably good travelling for a carrier's waggon in the seventeenth century. Here, then, we have the Father Adam, the great original, so far as records can tell us, of all the after charioteers of the Brighton Road. It is not until 1732, that, from the pages of "New Remarks on London," published by the Company of Parish Clerks, we hear anything further. At that date a coach set out on Thursdays from the "Talbot," in the Borough High Street, and a van on Tuesdays from the "Talbot" and the "George." In the summer of 1745 the "Flying Machine" left the "Old Ship," Brighthelmstone at 5.30 a.m., and reached Southwark in the evening. But the first extended and authoritative notice is found in 1746, when the widow of the Lewes carrier advertised in _The Lewes Journal_ of December 8th that she was continuing the business: