The Mail, meanwhile, maintained its ancient pace of a little over six miles an hour--a dignified, no-hurry, governmental rate of progression. There was, in fact, no need for the Brighton Mail to make speed, for the road from the General Post Office is only fifty-three miles in length, and all the night and the early morning, from eight o'clock until five or six o'clock a.m., lay before it. V We come now to the "Era of the Amateur," who not only flourished pre-eminently on the Brighton Road, but may be said to have originated on it. The coaching amateur and the nineteenth century came into existence almost contemporaneously. Very soon after 1800 it became "the thing" to drive a coach, and shortly after this became such a definite ambition, there arose that contradiction in terms, that horsey paradox, the Amateur Professional, generally a sporting gentleman brought to utter ruin by Corinthian gambols, and taking to the one trade on earth at which he could earn a wage. That is why the Golden Age of coaching won on the Brighton Road a refinement it only aped elsewhere. [Sidenote: ARISTOCRATIC COACHMEN] It is curious to see how coaching has always been, even in its serious days, before steam was thought of, the chosen amusement of wealthy and aristocratic whips. Of those who affected the Brighton Road may be mentioned the Marquis of Worcester, who drove the "Duke of Beaufort," Sir St. Vincent Cotton of the "Age," and the Hon. Fred Jerningham, who drove the Day Mail. The "Age," too, had been driven by Mr. Stevenson, a gentleman and a graduate of Cambridge, whose "passion for the _bench_," as "Nimrod" says, superseded all other worldly ambitions. He became a coachman by profession, and a good professional he made; but he had not forgotten his education and early training, and he was, as a whip, singularly refined and courteous. He caused, at a certain change of horses on the road, a silver sandwich-box to be handed round to the passengers by his servant, with an offer of a glass of sherry, should any desire one. Another gentleman, "connected with the first families in Wales," whose father long represented his native county in Parliament, horsed and drove one side of this ground with Mr. Stevenson. This was "Sackie," Sackville Frederick Gwynne, of Carmarthenshire, who quarrelled with his relatives and took to the road; became part proprietor of the "Age," broke off from Stevenson, and eventually lived and died at Liverpool as a cabdriver. He drove a cab till 1874, when he died, aged seventy-three.