After him comes a country vicar who has no hesitation in accusing the coach of all sorts of robberies. Soon, he cries, you will be “turned off.” You never cared for church, and indeed, during service, you disturb everybody rumbling your loudest outside. Also you are so set up that you will never give place “either to cart or carre.” A surveyor is less personal than the vicar, but has little good to say of the coach, although he agrees with most of the others that for a nobleman of high rank, it is something of a necessity.
Finally the brewer appears and speedily puts an end to the wrangle.
“With that, comes up unto us a lustie tall fellow, sitting betweene two mōstrous great wheeles, drawne by a great old jade blinde of an eie, in a leather pilch, two emptie beere-barrels upon a brewer’s slings besides him, and old blew-cap all bedaub’d, and stincking with yest.... My name is _Beere-cart_, quoth hee, I came into England in _Henry_ the Seventh’s time.”
And the decision of the cart is, of course, that both coach and sedan shall give way to _him_. They are both to exercise great care, and the sedan is to have the wall. And he adds, turning to the smaller vehicle, a sentence which it is difficult to understand.
“You shall never,” he says, “carrie Coachman againe, for the first you ever carried was a Coachman, for which you had like to have sufferd, had not your Master beene more mercifull.”
Such quarrels were very frequent, not only at this time, but right on through the eighteenth century. Swift in one of his letters to Stella mentions an accident due to the carelessness of a chairman. “The chairman that carried me,” he says, “squeezed a great fellow against a wall, who wisely turned his back, and broke one of the side glasses in a thousand pieces. I fell a scolding, pretended I was like to be cut to pieces, and made them set down the chair in the Park, while they picked out the bits of glasses: and when I paid them, I quarrelled still, so they dared not grumble, and I came off for my fare: but I was plaguily afraid they would have said, God bless your honour, won’t you give us something for our glass?”
Swift was the author of an amusing satire on the same subject, wherein coach and sedan were no better friends than of old.