‘How we hate the Putney and Brentford stages that draw up in a line in Piccadilly, after the mails are gone,’ says Hazlitt, writing of the romance of the Mail Coach. Well, it may be that their five or ten mile journeys afforded no hold for the imagination, compared with the dashing ‘Quicksilver’ and the lightning ‘Telegraph’ to Exeter; but what on earth the Londoner of modest means who desired to travel to Putney or to Brentford would in those pre-omnibus times have done without those stages it is impossible to conceive. We, in these days, might just as well find romance in the majesty of the beautiful Great Western Express locomotives that speed between Paddington and Penzance, and then turn to the omnibuses that run to Hammersmith, and say, ‘How we hate the ’buses!’ All these suburban stages started from public-houses. There were quite a number which went to Brentford and on to Hounslow, and they set out from such forgotten houses as the ‘New Inn,’ Old Bailey; the ‘Goose and Gridiron,’ St. Paul’s Churchyard; the ‘Old Bell,’ Holborn; the ‘Gloucester Coffee House,’ Piccadilly; the ‘White Hart,’ ‘Red Lion,’ and ‘Spotted Dog,’ Strand; and the ‘Bolt-in-Tun,’ Fleet Street. It is to be feared that those stages were not ‘Swiftsures,’ ‘Hirondelles,’ or ‘Lightnings.’ Nor, indeed, were ‘popular prices’ known in those days. Concessions had been made in this direction, it is true, some seven years before, when the man with the extraordinary name--Mr. Shillibeer--introduced the first omnibus, which ran between the ‘Yorkshire Stingo,’ in the New Road, Marylebone, and the City; and the very name ‘omnibus’ was originally intended as a kind of finger-post to point out the intended popularity of the new conveyance, but as the fare to the City was one shilling, it may readily be supposed that Bill Mortarmixer, Tom Tenon, and the whole of [Sidenote: _THE ‘GOOSE AND GRIDIRON’_] [Illustration: THE WEST COUNTRY MAILS STARTING FROM THE GLOUCESTER COFFEE HOUSE, PICCADILLY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).] their artisan brethren, who did not in those times aspire to one-and-twopence per hour, preferred to walk. For the same reason, they were only the comparatively affluent who could afford the eighteenpenny fare, or the two-hours journey, to Brentford by the ‘stage.’ Let us suppose ourselves to be of that fortunate company, and, paying our one-and-sixpence, set out from the ‘Goose and Gridiron.’ That old-fashioned hostelry, which stood modestly back from the roadway on the north side of St. Paul’s Churchyard, was, unhappily, demolished in 1894, after a good deal more than two centuries’ record for good cheer. It was originally the ‘Swan and Harp,’ but some irreverent wag, probably as far back as the building of the house in Wren’s time, found the other name for it, and the effigies of the goose and the gridiron remained even to our own time.