12. Seeing the luggage piled "Olympus high," so as to occasion an alarming oscillation.
13. Having the reins and whip placed in your unpractised hands while coachee indulges in a glass and chat.
14. To be, when dangling at the edge of a seat, overcome with drowsiness.
15. Exposed to piercing draughts, owing to a refractory glass; or, _vice versâ_, being in a minority, you are compelled, for the sake of ventilation, to thrust your umbrella accidentally through a pane.
16. At various seasons, suffocated with dust and broiled by a powerful sun; or crouching under an umbrella in a drenching rain--or petrified with cold--torn by fierce winds--struggling through snow--or wending your way through perilous floods.
17. Perceiving that a young squire is receiving an initiatory lesson into the art of driving; or that a jibbing horse, or a race with an opposition coach, is endangering your existence.
18. Losing the enjoyment, or employment, of much precious time, not only on the road, but also from subsequent fatigue.
19. Interrupted by your two rough-coated, big-buttoned, many-caped friends, the coachman and guard, who hope you will remember them before the termination of your hurried meal. Although the gratuity has been frequently calculated in anticipation, you fail in making the mutual reminiscences agreeable.
Clearly this was no _laudator temporis acti_.
But there are two sides to every medal, and it would be quite as easy to draw up an equally long and convincing list of the joys of coaching. It was not always raining or snowing when you wished to go a journey. Highwaymen were always too many, but they did not lurk in every lane; and the coach was not overturned on every journey, nor, even when a coach _did_ upset, were the spilled passengers killed and injured with the revolting circumstance and hideous complexity of a railway accident. On a trip by coach, it was possible to see something of the country and to fill one's lungs with fresh air, instead of coal-smoke and sulphur--and so forth, _ad infinitum_!
The Augustan age of coaching,--by which I mean the period when George IV. was king,--was celebrated for the number of gentlemen-drivers who ran smart coaches upon the principal roads from London. Many of them mounted the box-seat for the sake of sport alone: others, who had run through their property and come to grief after the manner of the time, became drivers of necessity. They could fulfil no other useful occupation, for at that day professionalism was confined only to the Ring, and although professors of the Noble Art of Self-Defence were admired and (in a sense) envied, they were not gentlemen, judge them by what standard you please. What was a poor Corinthian to do? To beg he would have been ashamed, to dig would have humiliated him no less; the only way to earn a living and yet retain the respect of his fellows, was to become a stage-coachman. He had practically no alternative. Not yet had the manly sports of cricket and football produced their professionals; lawn-tennis and cycling were not dreamed of, and the professional riders, the "makers' amateurs," subsidized heavily from Coventry, were a degraded class yet to be evolved by the young nineteenth century. So coachmen the young Randoms and Rake-hells of the times became, and let us do them the justice to admit that when they possessed handles to their names, they had the wit and right feeling to see that those accidents of their birth gave them no licence to assume "side" in the calling they had chosen for the love of sport or from the spur of necessity. If they were proud by nature, they pocketed their pride. They drove their best, took their fares, and pocketed their tips with the most ordinary members of the coaching fraternity, and they were a jolly band. Such were Sir St. Vincent Cotton; Stevenson of the "Brighton Age," a graduate he of Trinity College, Cambridge; and Captain Tyrwhitt Jones.