"Pierced the future, far as human eye could see, Seen the vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be," were to come forth and tell them, that before two centuries were over men would think far less of travelling from Oxford to London in one hour than they then did of doing so in a day, by means of a machine of iron, mounted upon wheels, which should rush along the ground, and drag a load, which a hundred horses could not move, as though it were a feather. Roger Bacon had prophesied as much four centuries before; the Marquis of Worcester was propounding the same theory at that very day, and yet who can blame them if they treated the notion as the falsehood of an impostor, or the hallucination of a lunatic? In these days when railways traverse the country in every direction, and are still multiplying rapidly, when no two towns of the least size and consideration are unprovided with this mode of mutual communication--when we step into a railway carriage as readily as into an omnibus, and breakfasting comfortably in London, are whisked off to Edinburgh, almost in time for the fashionable dinner hour,--it requires no little effort to realize the incredulity and contempt with which the idea of superseding the stage-coach by the steam locomotive, and having lines of iron railways instead of the common highways, was regarded for many years after the beginning of the present century. Even after the practicability of the project had been proved, and steam-engines had been seen puffing along the rails, with a train of carriages attached, even so late as 1825, we find one of the leading periodicals--the _Quarterly Review_--denouncing the gross exaggeration of the powers of the locomotive which its promoters were guilty of, and predicting that though it might delude for a time, it must end in the mortification of all concerned. The fact was, said the writer, that people would as soon suffer themselves to be fired off like a Congreve rocket, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate--the rate of eighteen miles an hour, which people now-a-days, accustomed to dash along in express trains at two or three times that speed, would deem a perfect snail-pace.