It has indeed been seen, and soldiers rush after it, and the huge Berline is brought back to Paris in what was surely the most terrible procession ever witnessed....
The Korff Berline was probably not built so high as some of the English posting chariots of the time. The perch of these was often more than four feet from the ground. According to Felton you could buy a plain post-chaise for £93, or a neat town chariot for £91. Or you might have a landaulet, a demi-landau, or a sulky, which at this time was “a light carriage built exactly in the form of a post-chaise, chariot, or demi-landau,” and like the vis-à-vis was “contracted on the seat, so that only one person can sit thereon, and is called a sulky from the proprietor’s desire of riding alone.” The landaulet was to the landau as the chariot was to the coach. It was simply a chariot made to open. The hood was of “greasy harness leather, disagreeable to the touch or smell, and continually needing oil and blacking” rubbed into it to keep it supple and black.
Then there was the phaeton, which had lost none of its popularity, and was built as lofty as ever.
“The handsomest mixture of danger with dignity,” wrote Leigh Hunt, “in the shape of a carriage, was the tall phaeton with its yellow wings. We remember looking up to it with respect in our childhood, partly for its loftiness, partly for its name, and partly for the show it makes in the prints to novels of the period. The most gallant figure which modern driving ever cut was in the person of a late Duke of Hamilton; of whom we have read or heard somewhere, that he used to dash round the streets of Rome, with his horses panting, and his hounds barking about his phaeton, to the equal fright and admiration of the Masters of the World, who were accustomed to witness nothing higher than a lumbering old coach, or a cardinal on a mule.”
But far more conspicuous a figure than this Duke of Hamilton was Colonel (Tommy) Onslow, afterwards Lord Cranley, of whom there is a caricature by Gillray, with the following once famous lines:—
“What can little T. O. do? Why drive a phaeton and two. Can little T. O. do no more? Yes, drive a phaeton and four!”
The Colonel, however, was surpassed, as we have seen, by Sir John Lade, who drove six greys. George IV, when Prince of Wales, was satisfied with a pair, but his horses were “caparisoned with blue harness stitched with red,” their manes “being plaited with scarlet ribbons, while they wore plumes of feathers on their heads.”