HOW THE COACH PASSENGERS FARED: MANNERS AND CUSTOMS DOWN THE ROAD
There is no consensus of opinion to be found among travellers by coach on the subject of the joys or sorrows of old-time travel. Everything depended on the weather, the coach, the other passengers, and upon the nature of the traveller himself. Sometimes a coach journey was a misery; at others it was a joy to look back upon. Humourists of the early and mid-eighteenth century found the subject of coach-travelling very attractive, and returned again and again to the stock characters of the braggart and domineering military man among the passengers, who was really a coward, and the modest, unassuming young man who always killed or dispersed the highwaymen while the captain, who by his own account had fought at Ramilies with Marlborough, prostrated himself on the floor and tried to crawl under the petticoats of the lady passengers or cover himself with the straw that strewed the floor. Those humourists could always get a laugh from such accounts, and sighs of appreciation from the ladies, who all wished they numbered among their acquaintance such proper young men as Roderick Random, who in Smollett’s romance performs such prodigies of valour in the “Exeter Fly” somewhere about the neighbourhood of Turnham Green.
“When I had taken my seat,” says Roderick, after an adventure of the kind already hinted at, “Miss Snapper, who from the coach had seen everything that had happened, made me a compliment on my behaviour; and said she was glad to see me returned without having received any injury; her mother, too, owned herself obliged to my resolution; and the lawyer told me I was entitled by Act of Parliament to a reward of forty pounds for having apprehended a highwayman. The soldier”--who had behaved in the conventional style of poltroonery--“observed, with a countenance in which impudence and shame, struggling, produced some disorder, that if I had not been in such a d----d hurry to get out of the coach, he would have secured the rogue effectually without all this bustle and loss of time, by a scheme which my heat and precipitation ruined. ‘For my part,’ continued he, ‘I am always extremely cool on these occasions.’