OLD ROADS AND NEW ROADS.

We have histories of all kinds in abundance,--and yet no good History of

Roads. "Wines ancient and modern," "Porcelain," "Crochet work,"

"Prisons," "Dress," "Drugs," and "Canary birds," have all and each found

a chronicler more or less able; and the most stately and imposing volume

we remember ever to have turned over was a history of "Button-making:"

you saw at once, by the measured complacency of the style, that the

author regarded his buttons as so many imperial medals. But of roads,

except Bergier's volumes on the Roman Ways, and a few learned yet rather

repulsive treatises in Latin and German, we have absolutely no readable

history. How has it come to pass that in works upon civilization, so

many in number, so few in worth, there are no chapters devoted to the

great arteries of commerce and communication? The subject of roads does

not appear even on that long list of books which the good Quintus Fixlein

_intended_ to write. Of Railways indeed, both British and foreign, there

are a few interesting memorials; but Railways are one branch only of a

subject which dates at least from the building of Damascus, earliest of

recorded cities.

Perhaps the very antiquity of roads, and the wide arc of generations

comprised in the subject, have deterred competent persons from attempting

it; yet therefore is it only the more strange that incompetent persons

have not essayed "this great argument," since they generally rush in,

where their betters fear to tread. A history of roads is, in great

measure indeed, a history of civilization itself. For highways and great

cities not merely presuppose the existence of each other, but are also

the issues and exponents of two leading impulses in the nature of man.

Actuated by the one--the centripetal instinct--the shepherd races of Asia

founded their great capitals on the banks of the Euphrates and the

Ganges: impelled by the other--the centrifugal instinct--they passed

forth from their cradle in the Armenian Highlands, westward as far as the

Atlantic, and eastward as far as the Pacific. We have indeed indications

of roads earlier than we have accounts of cities. For ages before

Arcadian Evander came as a "squatter" to Mount Palatine, was there not

the great road of the Hyperboreans from Ausonia to Delphi, by which, with

each revolving year, the most blameless of mankind conveyed to the Dorian

Sun-god their offerings? And as soon as Theseus--the organizer of men,

as his name imports--had slain the wolves and bears and the biped

ruffians of the Corinthian Isthmus, did he not set up a direction-post,

informing the wayfarer that "this side was Peleponnesus, and that side

was Ionia"? Centuries of thought and toil indeed intervened between the

path across the plain or down the mountain-gorge and the Regina Viarum,

the Appian Road; and centuries between the rude stone-heap which marked

out to the thirsting wayfarer the well in the desert, and the stately

column which told the traveller, "This is the road to Byzantium."

In the land of "Geryon's sons," the paths which scaled the sierras were

attributed to the toils of Hercules. In Boeotia, at a most remote era,

there was a broad carriage-road from Thebes to Phocis, and at one of its

intersections by a second highway the homicide of Laius opened the "long

process" of woes, which for three generations enshrouded, as with "the

gloom of earthquake and eclipse," the royal house of Labdacus. We have

some doubts about the nature, or indeed the existence, of the road along

which the ass Borak conveyed Mahommed to the seventh heaven: but we have

no grounds for questioning the fact of the great causeway, which Milton

saw in his vision, leading from Pandemonium to this earth, for have not

Sin and Death been travelling upon it unceasingly for now six thousand

years?

From that region beyond the moon, where, according to Ariosto--and Milton

also vouches for the fact,--all things lost on earth are to be found,

could we evoke a Carthaginian ledger, we would gladly purchase it at the

cost of one or two Fathers of the Church. It would inform us of many

things very pleasant and profitable to be known. Among others it would

probably give some inkling of the stages and inns upon the great road

which led from the eastern flank of Mount Atlas to Berenice, on the Red

Sea. This road was in ill odour with the Egyptians, who, like all close

boroughs, dreaded the approach of strangers and innovations. And the

Carthaginian caravans came much too near the gold-mines of the Pharaohs

to be at all pleasant to those potentates: it was

--"much I wis

To the annoyance of King Amasis."

But it is bootless to pine after knowledge irretrievably buried in

oblivion. Otherwise we might fairly have wished to have stood beside

King Nebuchadnezzar when he so unadvisedly uttered that proud vaunt which

ended in his being condemned to a long course of vegetable diet. For

doubtless he gazed upon at least four main roads which entered the walls

of Babylon from four opposite quarters:--

"From Arachosia, from Candaor east,

And Margiana, to the Hyrcanian cliffs

Of Caucasus, and dark Iberian dales:

From Atropatia and the neighbouring plains

Of Adiabene, Media, and the south

Of Susiana, to Balsara's havens."

We pass over as a mad imperial whim Caligula's road from Baiae to

Puteoli, partly because it was a costly and useless waste of money and

labour, and partly because that emperor had an awkward trick of flinging

to the fishes all persons who did not admire his road. It was a bad

imitation of a bad model--the road with which Xerxes bridled the

"indignant Hellespont." Both the Hellespontine and the Baian road

perished in the lifetime of their founders; while the Simplon still

attests the more sublime and practical genius of Napoleon. We should

have also greatly liked to watch the Cimbri and Ambrones at their work of

piling up those gigantic earth-mounds in Britain and in Gaul, which,

under the appellation of Devil's-dykes, are still visible and, as

monuments of patient labour and toil, second only to the construction of

the Pyramids.

The physiognomy of races is reflected in their public works. The warm

climate of Egypt was not the only cause for the long paven corridors

which ran underground from temple to temple, and conducted the Deputies

of the Nomes to their sacerdotal meeting in the great Labyrinth. It was

some advantage, indeed, to travel in the shade in a land where the summer

heats were intense, and refreshing rains of rare occurrence; but it was a

still greater recommendation to these covered ways that they enabled the

priests to assemble without displaying upon the broad highway of the Nile

the times and numbers of their synods. The pyramidal temples of Benares

communicated by vaulted paths with the Ganges, as the chamber of Cheops

communicated with the Nile. The capital of Assyria was similarly

furnished with covered roads, which enabled the priests of Bel to

communicate with one another, and with the royal palace, in a city three

days' journey in length and three in breadth. Civilization and

barbarism, indeed, in this respect met each another, and the caves of the

Troglodyte AEthiopians on the western shore of the Red Sea were connected

by numerous vaulted passages cut in the solid limestone, along which the

droves of cattle passed securely in the rainy season to their winter

stalls from the meadows of the Nile and the Astaboras.

Of the civil history of Carthage we know unfortunately but little. The

colonists of Tyre and Sidon are to the ages a dumb nation. All we know

of them is through the accounts of their bitter foes, the Greeks of

Sicily and the Romans. It is much the same as if the only records of

Manchester and Birmingham were to be transmitted to posterity by the

speeches of Mr. George Frederic Young. Yet we know that the

Carthaginians alone, among the nations of antiquity, made long

voyages,--perchance even doubled the Cape three thousand years before

Vasco de Gama broke the silence of the southern seas; and we are certain

also that their caravan traffic with Central Africa and the coasts of the

Red Sea passed along defined and permeable roads, with abiding land-marks

of hostelry, well, and column. And we know more than this. The Romans,

who jealously denied to other nations all the praise for arts or arms

which they could withhold, yet accorded to the Carthaginians the

invention of that solid intessellation of granite-blocks which is beheld

still upon the fragments of the Appian Road. The highways which conveyed

to the warehouses of Carthage the ivory, gold-dust, slaves, and aromatic

gums of Central Libya ran through miles of well-ordered gardens and by

hundreds of villas; and it was the ruthless destruction of these

country-seats of the merchant-princes of Byrsa, which forced upon them

the first and the second peace with Rome.

The Grecian roads, like the modern European highways, represented the

free genius of the people: they were often sinuous in their course, and,

respecting the boundaries of property, wound around the hills rather than

disturb the ancient landmarks. Up to a certain point the character of

the Grecian Republics was marked rather by rapid progression than by

permanence. Their roads were of a less massive construction than the

Roman, consisting for the most part of oblong blocks, and were not very

artificially constructed, except in the neighbourhood of the great

emporia of traffic, Corinth, and Athens, and Syracuse. Sparta possessed

two principal military highways, one in the direction of Argolis, and

another in that of Mycene; but the roads in the interior of Laconia were

little better than drift-ways for the conveyance of agricultural produce

from the field to the garner, or from the farm-yard to the markets of the

capital and the sea-ports.

The Romans were emphatically the road-makers of the ancient world. An

ingenious but somewhat fanciful writer of the present day has compared

the literature of Rome to its great Viae. One idea, he remarks,

possessed its poets, orators, and historians--the supremacy of the City

on the Seven Hills; and Lucan, Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus, various as were

their idiosyncrasies, still present a formal monotony, which is not found

to the same degree in any other literature. This censure is, perhaps, as

regards the literature of the Roman people, rather overstated; but it

applies literally to their roads, aqueducts, and tunnels. The State was

the be-all and the end-all of social life: the wishes, the prejudices,

the conveniences of private persons never entered into account with the

planners and finishers of the Appian Way, or the Aqueduct of Alcantara.

The vineyard of Naboth would have been taken from him by a single

_senatus consultum_, without the scruples of Ahab and without the crime

of Jezebel. The Roman roads were originally constructed, like our own,

of gravel and beaten stone; the surface was slightly arched, and the

Macadamite principle was well understood by the contractors for the

earliest of the Sabine highways, the Via Salaria {9}. But after the

Romans had borrowed from Carthage the art of intessellation, their roads

were formed of polygonal blocks of immense thickness, having the

interstices at the angles well filled with flints, and in some instances,

as at Pompeii, with wedges of iron and granite; so that they resembled on

a plane the vertical face of a Cyclopean or polygonal wall. Upon the

roads themselves were imposed the stately and sonorous epithets of

Consular and Praetorian; and had the records of the western Republic

perished as completely as those of its commercial rival, the Appian Road

would have handed down to the remotest ages one of the names of the

pertinacious censor of the Claudian house. To the Commonwealth,

perpetually engaged in distant wars on its frontiers, it was of the

utmost importance to possess the most rapid means of communicating with

its provinces, and of conveying troops and ammunition. To the Empire it

was no less essential to correspond easily with its vast circle of

dependencies. The very life of the citizens, who, long before the age of

Augustus, had ceased to be a corn-producing people, was sometimes

dependent upon the facility of transit, and the rich plains of Lombardy

and Gaul poured in their stores of wheat and millet, and of salted pork

and beef, when the harvest of Egypt failed through an imperfect

inundation of the Nile. But the convenience of travellers was as much

consulted as the necessity of the subjects of Rome. A foot-pavement on

each side was secured by a low wall against the intrusion or collision of

wheel carriages. Stones to mount horses (for stirrups were unknown) {10}

were placed at certain distances for the behoof of equestrians; and the

miles were marked upon blocks of granite or peperino, the useful

invention of the popular tribune Caius Gracchus. Trees and fences by the

sides were cut to admit air, and ditches, like ours, carried off the rain

and residuary water from the surface. The office of _Curator Viarum_, or

Road Surveyor, was bestowed upon the most illustrious members of the

Senate, and the Board of Health in our days may feel some satisfaction in

knowing that Pliny the Younger once held the office of Commissioner of

Sewers on the AEmilian Road. Nay, the ancients deemed no office tending

to public health and utility beneath them; and after his victory at

Mantinea, Epaminondas was appointed Chairman of the Board of Scavengers

at Thebes.

We close this part of our subject, which must not expand into an

archaeological dissertation, with the following extract from the most

eloquent and learned of the English historians who have treated of Rome.

"All these cities were connected with one another and with the

capital by the public highways, which, issuing from the Forum of

Rome, traversed Italy, pervaded the provinces, and were terminated

only by the frontiers of the empire. If we carefully trace the

distance from the wall of Antoninus to Rome, and from thence to

Jerusalem, it will be found that the great chain of communication,

from the north-west to the south-east point of the empire, was drawn

out to the length of four thousand and eighty Roman miles. The

public roads were accurately divided by milestones, and ran in a

direct line from one city to another, with very little respect for

the obstacles either of nature or of private property. Mountains

were perforated, and bold arches thrown over the broadest and most

rapid streams. The middle part of the road was raised into a

terrace, which commanded the adjacent country, consisted of several

strata of sand, gravel, and cement, and was paved with large stones,

or, in some places near the capital, with granite. Such was the

solid construction of the Roman highways, whose firmness has not

entirely yielded to the effect of fifteen centuries. They united the

subjects of the most distant provinces by an easy and familiar

intercourse; but their primary object had been to facilitate the

marches of the legions; nor was any country considered as completely

subdued till it had been rendered in all its parts pervious to the

arms and authority of the conqueror. The advantage of receiving the

earliest intelligence, and of conveying their orders with celerity,

induced the emperors to establish throughout their extensive

dominions the regular institution of posts. Houses were everywhere

erected at the distance only of five or six miles; each of these was

constantly provided with forty horses, and by the help of these

relays it was easy to travel a hundred miles on a day along the Roman

roads."

Wherever the Romans conquered they inhabited, and introduced into all

their provinces, from Syene, "where the shadow both way falls," to the

_ultima Thule_ of the Scottish border, the germs of Latin civilization.

To this imperial people England and France owe their first roads; for the

drift-ways along the dykes of the Celts scarcely deserve the name. The

most careless observer must have remarked the strong resemblance between

the right lines and colossal structure of the Roman Viae and the modern

Railroad. We have indeed arrived at a very similar epoch of civilization

to that of the Caesarian era, but with adjuncts derived from a purer

religion, and from more generous and expanded views of commerce and the

interdependence of nations, than were vouchsafed by Providence to the

ancient world.

* * * * *

Roads being so essential a feature of all political communities, it might

have been expected that if no other feature of Roman cultivation had

survived the wreck of the Empire, the great arteries of intercourse would

at least have been retained. But the works of man's hand are the

exponent of his ideas; and the ideas of the Teutonic and Celtic races who

divided among themselves the patrimony of the Caesars were essentially

different from those entertained and embodied by Greece and Rome. The

State ceased to be an organic and self-attracting body. The individual

rather than the corporate existence of man became the prevalent

conception of the Church and of legislators; and nations sought rather to

isolate themselves from one another, than to coalesce and correspond.

Moreover, the life of antiquity was eminently municipal. The city was

the germ of each body politic, and the connection of roads with cities is

obvious. But our Teutonic ancestors abhorred civic life. They generally

shunned the towns, even when accident had placed them in the very centre

of their shires or marks, and when the proximity of great rivers or the

convenience of walls and markets seemed to hold out every inducement to

take possession of the vacant enclosures. The castle and the cathedral

became the nucleus of the Teutonic cities. Hamlets crept around the

precincts of the sacred and the outworks of the secular building: but it

was long before the Lord Abbot or the Lord Chatelain regarded with any

feelings but disdain, the burgher who exercised his trade or exposed his

wares in the narrow lanes of the town which abutted on his domains, and

enriched his manorial exchequer.

In many cases indeed the Roman cities were allowed to decay: the forest

resumed its rights: the feudal castle was constructed from the ruins of

the Proconsul's palace and the Basilica, or if these edifices were too

massive for demolition, they were left standing in the waste--the

Mammoths and Saurians of a bygone civilization. The great Viae were for

leagues overgrown with herbage, or concealed by wood and morass; and for

the direct arms of transit which bound Rome and York together as by the

cord of a bow, were substituted the devious and inconvenient highways,

which led the traveller by circuitous routes from one province to

another. The contrast indeed between the 'Old Road and the New' is

represented in Schiller's fine image--rendered even finer in Coleridge's

translation:--

"Straight forward goes

The lightning's path, and straight the fearful path

Of the cannon ball. Direct it flies, and rapid,

Shattering that it may reach, and shattering what it reaches.

My son! the road the human being travels,

That on which blessing comes and goes, doth follow

The river's course, the valley's playful windings,

Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines,

Honouring the holy bounds of property:

And thus secure, though late, leads to its end."

It was long however before much security was found on the new roads. In

the dark ages the days described by Deborah the prophetess had returned.

"The highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through

bye-ways: the villages were deserted. Then was war in the gates, and

noise of the archers in the places of drawing water." Danger and delay

were often the companions of the traveller. Occasionally a vigorous

ruler, like Alfred, succeeded in restoring security to the wayfarer, and

proved his success (so said the legend) by hanging up, in defiance of the

plunderer, golden armlets on crosses by the roadside. But these

intervals of safety were few and far between, and the traveller

journeyed, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, "in fear and dread,"

"Because he knew a fearful fiend

Did close behind him tread."

The man-at-arms in the days of Border-war was a more formidable obstacle

to progress than a wilderness of spectres. In the reign of Edward the

Confessor the great highway of Watling Street was beset by violent men.

If you travelled in the eastern counties, the chances were that you were

snapped up by a retainer of Earl Godwin, and if in the district now

traversed by the Great Northern Railway, Earl Morcar would in all

likelihood arrest your journey, and without so much as asking leave clap

a collar round your neck, with his initials and yours scratched rudely

upon it, signifying to all men, by those presents, that in future your

duty was to tend his swine or rive his blocks. Outlaws, dwelling in the

forests or in the deep morass which girded the road, pounced upon the

traveller on the causeway, eased him of his luggage if he carried any,

and if there was no further occasion for his services, they either let

him down easily into the next quagmire, or if they were, for those days,

gentlemanly thieves, left him standing, as Justice Shallow has it, like a

"forked radish," to enjoy the summer's heat or the winter's cold. The

cross and escallop shell of the pilgrim were no protection: "Cucullus non

fecit monachum" in the eyes of these minions of the road; or rather,

perhaps, the hood gave a new zest to the wrongs done to its wearer by

these "uncircumcised Philistines." Convents, the abodes of men

professing at least to be peaceful, were obliged to keep in pay William

of Deloraine to mate with Jock of Thirlstane: and ancient citizens were

fain to put by their grave habiliments, and "wield old partisans in hands

as old." There is extant an agreement made between Leofstan, Abbot of

St. Albans, and certain barons, by which the Abbot agrees to hire, and

the barons to let, certain men-at-arms for the security of the Abbey, and

for scouring the forests. Savage capital punishments--impalement,

mutilation, hanging alive in chains--were inflicted on the marauders, who

duly acknowledged these attentions by yet more atrocious severities upon

the wayfarers who had the ill luck to be caught by them.

The insecurity of the old roads necessarily affected the manners of the

time. He should have been a hardy traveller who would venture himself

"single and sole," when he might journey in company. The same cause

which leads to the formation of the caravans of Africa and Asia, led to

the collection of such goodly companies of pilgrims as wended their way

from the Tabard in Southwark to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury;

and the pursuit of travelling under difficulties produced for all

posterity the most delightful of the poems of the great father of English

verse.

Travelling in companies, in times when it was next to impossible to be on

"visiting terms with one's neighbours," tended greatly to the improvement

of social intercourse, and to the erection of roomy and comfortable inns

for the wayfarers. It took Dan Chaucer only a few hours to be on the

best footing with the nine and twenty guests at the Tabard.

"Befelle that, in that season {18} on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay,

Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage

To Canterbury with devout corage,

At night was come into that hostelrie

Wel nine and twentie in a compagnie

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle

In felawship; and pilgrimes were they alle,

That toward Canterbury wolden ride.

The chambres and the stables weren wide,

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

And shortly, whan the sonne was gone to reste

So hadde I spoken with hem everich on,

That I was of hir felawship anon."

But the tenants of the waste and the woodland were not the only lords of

the highway. The Norman baron drew little profit from the natural

produce of his ample domains. In his way he was a staunch protectionist;

but he left agriculture very much to take care of itself, and looked to

his tolls, his bridges, and above all to his highways, for a more rapid

return of the capital he had invested in accoutring men-at-arms, squires,

and archers. We know, from 'Ivanhoe,' how it fared with Saxons,

Pilgrims, and Jews, whose business led them near the castles of Front de

Boeuf or Philip de Malvoisin: and we are certain that the Lady of

Branksome kept, an expensive establishment, who were expected to bring

grist to the mill of the lord or lady of the demesne, by turning out in

all weathers and at all hours, whenever a herd of beeves or a company of

pilgrims were descried by the watchers from Branksome Towers. For it

must have taken no small quantity of beef and hides to furnish the

Branksome retainers in dinners and shoe- and saddle-leather; since--

"Nine and twenty knights of fame

Hung their shields in Branksome Hall:

Nine and twenty squires of name

Brought them their steeds to bower from stall:

Nine and twenty yeomen tall

Waited duteous on them all:

They were all knights of mettle true,

Kinsmen to the bold Buccleugh."

When the traveller carried money in his purse, or the merchant had store

of Sheffield whittles or Woodstock gloves in his pack, the lowest dungeon

in the castle of the Bigods was his doom; and he was a lucky man who came

out again from those crypts which now so much delight our archaeological

associations, with a tithe of his possessions, or with his proper

allowance of eyes, hands, and ears.

Even on the Roman roads, with their good accommodation of pavement,

milestones, and towns, journeys were for the most part performed on foot

or horseback. For before steel springs were invented, it was by no means

pleasant to ride all day in a jolting cart--and the most gorgeous of the

Roman _carrucae_, or coaches, was no better. Pompous and splendid

indeed--to pass for a moment from Norman and Saxon barbarism--must have

been the aspect of the Queen of Roads within a few leagues of the capital

of the world; splendid and pompous as it was to the actual beholder, it

is perhaps seen to best advantage in the following description by

Milton--

"Thence to the gates cast round thine eye, and see

What conflux issuing forth, or entering in;

Praetors, proconsuls to their provinces

Hasting or on return, in robes of state,

Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power,

Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings;

Or embassies from regions far remote,

In various habits, on the Appian road,

Or on the AEmilian."

As a pendant to this breathing picture oftan Old Road at the gate of the

"vertex omnium civitatum," we subjoin a note from Gibbon:--

"The _carrucae_ or coaches of the Romans were often of solid silver,

curiously carved and engraved, and the trappings of the mules or

horses were embossed with gold. This magnificence continued from the

reign of Nero to that of Honorius: and the Appian Road was covered

with the splendid equipages of the nobles who came out to meet St.

Melania, when she returned to Rome, six years before the Gothic

siege. Yet pomp is well exchanged for convenience; and a plain

modern coach, that is hung upon springs, is much preferable to the

silver and gold _carts_ of antiquity, which rolled on the axle-tree,

and were exposed, for the most part, to the inclemency of the

weather." {21a}

The Anglo-Saxon generally travelled on horseback. The Jews were

restricted to the ignobler mule. The former indeed had a species of

carriage; and horse-litters, probably for the use of royal or noble

ladies and invalids, are mentioned by Matthew Paris and William of

Malmesbury. Wheel-carriages appear to have multiplied after the return

of the Crusaders from Palestine--partly, it may be inferred, because

increased wealth had inspired a taste for novel luxuries, and partly

because the champions of the Cross had imbibed in the Holy War some of

the prejudices of the infidels, and had grown chary of exposing to vulgar

gaze their dames and daughters on horseback. {21b}

The speed of travelling depends upon the nature and facilities of the

means of transit. Herodotus mentions a remarkable example of speed in a

Hemerodromus, or running-post, named Phidippides, who in two days ran

from Athens to Sparta, a distance of nearly 152 English miles, to hasten

the Laconian contingent, when the Persians were landing on the beach of

Marathon. Couriers of this order, trained to speed and endurance from

their infancy, conveyed to Montezuma the tidings of the disembarkation of

Cortes; and so imperfect were the means of communication at that era in

Europe, that the Spaniards noted it as a proof of high refinement in the

Aztecs to employ relays of running postmen, from all quarters of their

empire to the city on the Great Lake. The speed of a Roman traveller was

probably the greatest possible before the invention of carriage-springs

and railways. We have some data on this head. The mighty Julius was a

rapid traveller. He continually mentions his _summa diligentia_ in his

journal of the Gaulish Wars. The length of journeys which he

accomplished within a given time, appears even to us at this day, and

might well therefore appear to his contemporaries, truly astonishing. A

distance of one hundred miles was no extraordinary day's journey for him.

When he did not march with his army on foot,--as he often seems to have

done, in order to set his soldiers an example, and also to express that

sympathy with them which gained him their hearts so entirely--he mostly

travelled in a _rheda_. This was a four-wheeled carriage, a sort of

curricle, and adapted to the carriage of about half a ton of luggage.

His personal baggage was probably considerable, for he was a man of most

elegant habits, and sedulously attentive to his personal appearance. The

tessellated flooring of his tent formed part of his _impedimenta_, and,

like Napoleon, he expected to find amid the distractions of war many of

the comforts and conveniences of his palace at Rome. He reached the

Sierra Morena in twenty-three days from the date of his leaving Rome; and

he went the whole way by land. The distance round the head of the Gulf

of Genoa and through the passes of the Pyrenees is 850 leagues; and

although the Carthaginians had once been masters of Spanish Navarre, the

roads were far from regular or good. The same distance would now be

accomplished in twelve days by a general and his mounted staff. From the

usual rapidity with which the great Proconsul travelled, Cowley, in his

Essay on 'Procrastination,' extracts a moral, or, as his Puritan

contemporaries would have phrased it, a "pious use." "Caesar," he says,

"the man of expedition above all others, was so far from this folly

(procrastination), that whensoever in a journey he was to cross any

river, he never went out of his way for a bridge, or a ford, or a ferry,

but flung himself into it immediately, and swam over; and this is the

course we ought to imitate, if we meet with any stops in our way to

happiness." In the time of Theodosius, Caesarius, a magistrate of high

rank, went post from Antioch to Constantinople. He began his journey at

night, was in Cappadocia, 165 miles from Antioch, the ensuing evening,

and arrived at Constantinople the sixth day about noon. The whole

distance was 725 Roman, or 665 English miles.

Gibbon describes bishops as among the most rapid of ancient travellers.

The decease of a patriarch of Alexandria or Antioch caused the death of

scores of post-horses, from the rate at which anxious divines hurried to

Constantinople to solicit from the Emperor the vacant see. On the whole

however, in respect of speed in travelling, the Greeks and Romans were

but slow coaches; and these exceptional instances merely serve to prove

the general slackness of their pace. A Roman nobleman indeed, with all

the means and appliances which his wealth could purchase, and with the

positive advantage of the best roads in the world, travelled generally

with such a ponderous train, that the heavy-armed legions with their

parks of artillery might well advance as rapidly as an Olybrius or

Anicius of the Empire. "In their journeys into the country," says

Ammianus, "the whole body of the household marches with their master. In

the same manner as the cavalry and infantry, the heavy and the light

armed troops, the advanced guard and the rear, are marshalled by the

skill of their military leaders; so the domestic officers who bear the

rod, as an ensign of authority, distribute and arrange the numerous train

of slaves and attendants. The baggage and wardrobe move in the front;

and are immediately followed by a multitude of cooks and inferior

ministers, employed in the service of the kitchen and of the table. The

main body is composed of a promiscuous crowd of slaves, increased by the

accidental concourse of idle or dependent plebeians."

At an even earlier period, in the age of Nero, before luxury had made the

gigantic strides which distinguished and disgraced the Byzantine Court,

Seneca records three circumstances relative to the journeys of the Roman

nobility. They were preceded by a troop of Numidian light horse who

announced by a cloud of dust the approach of a great man. Their

baggage-mules transported not only the precious vases, but even the

fragile vessels of crystal and _murra_, which last probably meant the

porcelain of China and Japan. The delicate faces of the young slaves

were covered with a medicated crust or ointment, which secured them

against the effects of the sun and frost. Rightly did the Romans name

their baggage _impedimenta_. A funeral pace was the utmost that could be

expected from travellers so particular about their accommodations as

these luxurious senators. Of a much humbler character was the state

observed by the monarchs who succeeded to portions of the empire of the

Caesars. The Merovingian kings, when they employed wheel carriages at

all, rode in wains drawn by bullocks; the Bretwaldas of the Saxon

kingdoms went to temple or church on high festivals in the same cumbrous

fashion; and "slow oxen" dragged the standard of the Italian Republics

into the battle-field.

With the disuse or breaking up of the great Roman Viae in our island, the

difficulty and delay of travelling increased, and more than thirteen

centuries elapsed before it was again possible to journey with any

tolerable speed. Wolsey indeed, it is well known, by the singular

rapidity with which he conveyed royal letters to and from Brussels,

galloped swiftly up the road of royal favour: and by his fast style of

living at home afterwards galloped even more swiftly down again.

Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, was noted for his incessant restlessness,

and his rapid mode of passing from one land to another; but then he

dispensed with all state and attendance, and rode like a post-boy from

one end of Europe to another. As the readers of Pope, Swift, and their

contemporaries are daily becoming fewer in number, we venture to extract

the Dean's pleasant burlesque on this eccentric nobleman's migratory

habits.

"Mordanto fills the trump of fame,

The Christian worlds his deeds proclaim,

And prints are crowded with his name.

In journeys he outrides the post,

Sits up till midnight with his host,

Talks politics and gives the toast;

Knows every prince in Europe's face,

Flies like a squib from place to place,

And travels not, but runs a race.

From Paris gazette a-la-main,

This day arrived, without his train,

Mordanto in a week from Spain.

A messenger comes all a-reek,

Mordanto at Madrid to seek;

He left the town above a week.

Next day the post-boy winds his horn,

And rides through Dover in the morn;

Mordanto's landed from Leghorn.

Mordanto gallops on alone;

The roads are with his followers strown;

This breaks a girth and that a bone.

His body active as his mind,

Returning sound in limb and wind,

Except some leather lost behind.

A skeleton in outward figure,

His meagre corpse, though full of vigour,

Would halt behind him, were it bigger.

So wonderful his expedition,

When you have not the least suspicion

He's with you like an apparition."

The badness of the roads and the rude forms of wheel-carriages added to

the expense of travelling. A canon of Salisbury Cathedral may now travel

to London at a cost which is scarcely felt by his prebendal income: but

in the days of Peter of Blois the whole proceeds of a stall were

inadequate to the expenses of such a journey. In the thirteenth century

a bishop of Hereford was detained at Wantling by lack of money for

post-horses, and but for the aid of some pious monastery or peccant baron

in the neighbourhood, who seized the opportunity of compounding for his

sins, the successor of the apostles must, like the apostles, have

completed his journey on foot.

In the fourteenth century roads were so far improved, that jobbing horses

became a regular business, and the licenses for hackneys and guides added

to the returns of the exchequer. A fare of twelvepence was paid for

horse-hire from Southwark to Rochester; and sixpence was the charge of

conveyance from Canterbury to Dover. We do not know the rate at which

the equestrians travelled. Ancient Pistol informs us that "the

hollow-pampered jades of Asia could go but thirty miles a-day." But

these cattle seem to have been like Jeshurun, fat and perchance kicking,

and accustomed to the tardy pace of Asiatic pomp.

Shakspeare and Steele both expatiate on the casualties incident to riding

upon hired horses. Petruchio and Catherine, like Dr. Samuel Johnson and

Hetty, made their wedding tour on horseback; and each trip ended with a

similar result--the temporary obedience of the fair brides to the marital

yokes. After this fashion Grumio tells the story of the connubial

ride:--"We came down a foul hill, my master riding behind my mistress."

"Both on one horse?" says Curtis, apparently unacquainted with the

fashion of pillions. "What's that to thee?" rejoins Grumio. "Tell thou

the tale. But hadst thou not crossed me, thou shouldst have heard how

her horse fell, and she under her horse; thou shouldst have heard in how

miry a place; how she was bemoiled; how he left her with the horse upon

her; how he beat me because her horse stumbled; how she waded through the

dirt to pluck him off me; how he swore; how she prayed; how I cried; how

the horses ran away; how her bridle was burst; how I lost my crupper."

That Petruchio rode a hired horse is rendered probable by the wretched

character of his steed and its furniture. Hudibras or Don Quixote were

not worse mounted than was the Shrew-tamer: seeing that his horse was

"hipped with an old mothy saddle, the stirrups of no kindred; besides,

possessed with the glanders, and like to mose in the chine; troubled with

the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped with

spavins, raied with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled

with the staggers, begnawn with the bots; swayed in the back and

shoulder-shotten, near-legged before, and with a half-checked bit, and a

headstall of sheep's leather; which, being restrained to keep him from

stumbling, hath been often burst, and now repaired with knots; one girt

six times pieced, and a woman's crupper of velure, here and there pieced

with packthread." {30}

Steele (Tatler, No. 231) has borrowed, without any acknowledgement, from

'Taming the Shrew,' most of the circumstances of his story; yet his

adoption of them shows that such a mode of travelling was still in common

use in the seventeenth century. After the honey-moon was over, the

bridegroom made preparations for conveying his new spouse to her future

abode. But "instead of a coach and six horses, together with the gay

equipage suitable to the occasion, he appeared without a servant, mounted

on a skeleton of a horse which his huntsman had, the day before, brought

in to feast his dogs on the arrival of their new mistress, with a pillion

fixed behind, and a case of pistols before him, attended only by a

favourite hound. Thus equipped, he, in a very obliging, but somewhat

positive manner, desired his lady to seat herself on the cushion; which

done, away they crawled. The road being obstructed by a gate, the dog

was commanded to open it; the poor cur looked up and wagged his tail: but

the master, to show the impatience of his temper, drew a pistol and shot

him dead. He had no sooner done it, but he fell into a thousand

apologies for his unhappy rashness, and begged as many pardons for his

excesses before one for whom he had so profound a respect. Soon after

their steed stumbled, but with some difficulty recovered; however, the

bridegroom took occasion to swear, if he frightened his wife so again, he

would run him through! And, alas! the poor animal, being now almost

tired, made a second trip; immediately on which the careful husband

alights, and with great ceremony first takes off his lady, then the

accoutrements, draws his sword, and saves the huntsman the trouble of

killing him: then says he to his wife, 'Child, prithee take up the

saddle;' which she readily did, and tugged it home, where they found all

things in the greatest order, suitable to their fortune and the present

occasion." This veracious history proceeds to say that, after this

practical lesson, the lady was ever remarkable for a sweet and compliant

temper.

Cotton's--"cheerful hearty Mr. Cotton"--description of a post-horse may

be less familiarly known to the reader than either of the preceding

descriptions of the inconveniences of riding post: it describes a journey

from the neighbourhood of Bakewell to Holyhead, about the year 1678.

"A guide I had got, who demanded great vails,

For conducting me over the mountains of Wales:

Twenty good shillings, which sure very large is;

Yet that would not serve, but I must bear his charges:

And yet for all that, rode astride on a beast,

The worst that e'er went on three legs, I protest.

It certainly was the most ugly of jades:

His hips and his rump made a right ace of spades;

His sides were two ladders, well spur-galled withal;

His neck was a helve, and his head was a mall;

For his colour, my pains and your trouble I'll spare,

For the creature was wholly denuded of hair,

And, except for two things, as bare as my nail,--

A tuft of a mane and a sprig of a tail.

Now such as the beast was, even such was the rider,

With head like a nutmeg, and legs like a spider;

A voice like a cricket, a look like a rat,

The brains of a goose, and the heart of a cat:

But now with our horses, what sound and what rotten,

Down to the shore, you must know, we were gotten;

And there we were told, it concerned us to ride,

Unless we did mean to encounter the tide.

And then my guide lab'ring with heels and with hands,

With two up and one down, hopped over the sands;

Till his horse, finding the labour for three legs too sore,

Foled out a new leg, and then he had four.

And now, by plain dint of hard spurring and whipping,

Dry-shod we came where folks sometimes take shipping.

And now hur in Wales is, Saint Taph be hur speed,

Gott splutter hur taste, some Welsh ale hur had need:

Yet surely the Welsh are not wise of their fuddle,

For this had the taste and complexion of puddle.

From thence then we marched, full as dry as we came,

My guide before prancing, his steed no more lame,

O'er hills and o'er valleys uncouth and uneven,

Until, 'twixt the hours of twelve and eleven,

More hungry and thirsty than tongue can well tell,

We happily came to St. Winifred's well."

Cotton's ride to Holyhead was not however nearly so diversified in its

adventures as a journey from Hardwick to Bakewell about the same period,

described by Edward, son of Sir Thomas Browne, the worthy knight and

physician of Norwich.

A tour in Derbyshire, in the year 1622, was indeed no light matter. Our

ancestors were much in the right to make their wills before encountering

the perils of a ride across the moors. We are constrained to abridge the

author's narrative, but the main incidents of it are preserved in our

transcript.

"This day broke very rudely upon us. I never travelled before in

such a lamentable day both for weather and way, but we made shift to

ride sixteen mile that morning, to Chesterfield in Derbyshire,

passing by Bolsover Castle, belonging to the Earl of Newcastle, very

finely seated upon a high hill; and missing our way once or twice, we

rode up mountain, down dale, till we came to our inn, when we were

glad to go to bed at noon. It was impossible to ride above two mile

an hour in this stormy weather: but coming to our inn, by the

ostler's help having lifted our crampt legs off our horses, we

crawled upstairs to a fire, when in two hours' time we had so well

dried ourselves without and liquored ourselves within, that we began

to be so valiant as to think upon a second march; but inquiring after

the business, we received great discouragement, with some stories of

a moor, which they told us we must go over. We had by chance lighted

on a house that was noted for good drink and a shovel-borde table,

which had invited some Derbyshire blades that lived at Bakewell, but

were then at Chesterfield about some business, to take a

strengthening cup before they would encounter with their journey home

that night. We, hearing of them, were desirous to ride in company

with them, so as we might be conducted in this strange, mountainous,

misty, moorish, rocky, wild country; but they, having drank freely of

their ale, which inclined them something to their countrie's natural

rudeness, and the distaste they took at our swords and pistols with

which we rid, made them loth to be troubled with our companies, till

I, being more loth to lose this opportunity than the other (one of

which had voted to lie in bed the rest of the day), went into the

room and persuaded them so well, as they were willing, not only to

afford us their company, but stayed for us till we accoutred

ourselves. And so we most courageously set forward again, the

weather being not one whit better, and the way far worse; for the

great quantity of rain that fell, came down in floods from the tops

of the hills, washing down mud, and so making a bog in every valley;

the craggy ascents, the rocky unevenness of the roads, the high

peaks, and the almost perpendicular descents, that we were to ride

down: but what was worse than all this, the furious speed that our

conductors, mounted upon such good horses, used to these hills, led

us on with, put us into such an amazement, as we knew not what to do,

for our pace we rode would neither give us opportunity to speak with

them or to consult with one another, till at length a friendly bough

that had sprouted out beyond his fellows over the road, gave our file

leader such a brush of the jacket as it swept him off his horse, and

the poor jade, not caring for its master's company, ran away without

him: by this means, while some went to get his courser for him,

others had time to come up to a general _rendezvous_; and concluded

to ride more soberly: but I think that was very hard for some of

these to do. Being all up again, our light-horsed companions

thundered away, and our poor jades, I think, being afraid, as well as

their masters, to be left alone in this desolate wide country, made

so much haste as they could after them; and this pace we rid, till we

lost sight of one another. At last our leaders were so civil, when

it was almost too late, to make another halt at the top of one of the

highest hills thereabout, just before we were to go to the moor: and

I was the last that got up to them, where, missing one of my

companions who was not able to keep up with us, I was in the greatest

perplexity imaginable, and desiring them to stay awhile, I rid back

again, whooping and hallooing out to my lost friend; but no creature

could I see or hear of, till at last, being afraid I had run myself

into the same inconvenience, I turned back again towards the

mountaineers, whom when I had recovered, they told me 't was no

staying there, and 't were better to kill our horses than to be left

in those thick mists, the day now drawing to an end: and so setting

spurs to their horses, they ran down a precipice, and in a short time

we had the favour to be rained on again, for at the top of this hill

we were drencht in the clouds themselves, which came not upon us drop

by drop, but cloud after cloud came puffing over the hill as if they

themselves had been out of breath with climbing it. Here all our

tackling failed, and he that fared best was wet to the skin, these

rains soaking through the thickest lined cloak: and now we were

encountering with the wild moor, which, by the stories we had been

told of it, we might have imagined a wild bore. I am sure it made us

all grunt before we could get over it, it was such an uneven rocky

track of road, full of great holes, and at that time swells with such

rapid currents, as we had made most pitiful shift, if we had not been

accommodated with a most excellent conductor; who yet, for all his

haste, fell over his horse's head as he was plunging into some dirty

hole, but by good luck smit his face into a soft place of mud, where

I suppose he had a mouth full both of dirt and rotten stick, for he

seemed to us to spit crow's nest a good while after. Now, being

forced to abate something of their speed, I renewed my acquaintance

with two of our new companions, and made them understand how we had

left a third man behind us, not being able to ride so fast, and how

our intentions were to stay at their own town with them this night,

who now overjoyed to see an old acquaintance, were so kind and loving

that what with shaking hands, riding abreast, in this bad way, and

other expressions of their civilities, they put me in as much trouble

with their favour as before they had put me to inconvenience by their

rudeness: yet, by this means, I procured them to ride so easily as I

led my horse down the next steep hill, on the side of which lay a

vast number of huge stones, one intire stone of them being as big as

an ordinary house: some of the smaller they cut into mill-stones.

Passing the river--Derwent--which then ran with the strongest current

that ever I beheld any, we climbed over another hill, a mile up and a

mile down, and got to Bakewell a little after it was dark."

We have a few data of the speed possible in travelling on extraordinary

occasions. We select one of each kind--that of the mounted express and

that of the Great Lady who kept her carriage, as the extremes, so far as

regards the instruments of conveyance. For a horseman can go where a

wheel-carriage cannot find a track: and on the other hand, the traveller

on foot can generally choose a more direct line of movement, than is

practicable for the four-footed servant of man, encumbered with his rider

and his furniture.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the herald of the king of

Scotland, who, it may be supposed, carried with him a royal mandate to be

first served by the livery stables, was allowed forty days to reach the

Border from London, although it appears that Robert Bruce took only seven

to put the Border between himself and Gloucester. But neither Bruce nor

the mother of Richard II., who came in one day from Canterbury to London,

can be taken as precedents of ordinary speed. For the one had received a

significant hint from some friendly courtier--a pair of spurs baked in a

pie--that King Edward was in high dudgeon with him, and could not dine

with either appetite or good digestion, until he had seen Bruce's head:

and of the Queen dowager is it not written that "she never durst tarry on

the waye," for Wat Tyler was behind her, vowing vengeance upon all

principalities and powers? Howbeit her majesty was so thoroughly jolted

and unsettled by the "slapping pace" at which she travelled, that she had

a bilious attack forthwith, and was "sore syke, and like to die."

To the difficulty of transit on roads was owing the establishment of

great annual fairs, still imperfectly represented by our Wakes,

Statute-fairs, and periodical assemblages of itinerant vendors of goods.

These commercial re-unions are still common in the East, and still

frequent in Central Europe; although in England, where every hamlet has

now happily its general shop, and where the towns rival the metropolis in

the splendour of gas-lamps and the glory of plate-glass windows, such

Fairs have degenerated into yearly displays of giants, dwarfs,

double-bodied calves, and gorgeous works in gingerbread. To our

ancestors, with their simpler habits of living, supply and demand, these

annual meetings served as permanent divisions of the year. The good

housewife who bought her woollens and her grocery, the yeoman who chose

his frieze-coat, his gay waistcoat, and the leathern integuments of his

sturdy props, once only in twelve months, would compute the events of his

life after the following fashion:--"It happened three months after last

Bury or Chester Fair;" or, "Please Heaven, the bullocks shall be

slaughtered the week before the next Statute." Nay, dates were often

extracted, in the courts of justice, by the help of such periodical

memoranda. The Church of Rome, with its unerring skill in absorbing and

insinuating itself into all the business or pleasures of mankind, did not

overlook these popular gatherings. And if the ascetic Anthony, the

sturdy Christopher, or that "painful martyr," St. Bartholomew, minded

earthly matters in the regions of their several beatitudes, they must

have been often more scandalized than edified by the boisterous

amusements of those who celebrated their respective Feasts. In these

particulars, however, Ecclesiastical Rome was merely a borrower from its

elder Pagan sister. The Compitalia of ancient Rome were street-fairs

dedicated to the worship of local deities, and the Thirty cities of

Latium held annually, on the slope of the Alban Mount, a great fair as

well as a great council of Duumviri and Decuriones. To the ancient fairs

of Southern Italy we are indebted for one of our oldest and most

agreeable acquaintances. The swinging puppets of the Oscans were

gradually confined within a portable box, and danced or gesticulated upon

a miniature stage. Their dumb-show was relieved by the extemporary jests

and songs of the showman, until at length, one propitious morning, some

Homer or Shakspeare of the streets conceived the sublime idea of

embodying these scattered rays of satire and jest in the portly person

of--Mr. Punch.

The original fair of the East and mediaeval Europe was one of the most

instructive and picturesque spectacles among the many gatherings of the

human race. The Great Fair of Novogorod assembled, and still continues

to assemble, myriads of nearly every colour and costume: and in the

market of "the Sledded Russ" the small-eyed Chinese stood side by side

with the ebony-complexioned native of Guinea. Among the many pictures

which Sir Thomas Browne desired to see painted was "a delineation of the

Great Fair of Almachara in Arabia, which, to avoid the great heat of the

sun, is kept in the night, and by the light of the moon." The worthy and

learned knight does not mention the Great Fair of the _Hurdwar_, in the

northern part of Hindostan, where a confluence of many millions of human

beings is brought together under the mixed influences of devotion and

commercial business, and, dispersing as rapidly as it has been evoked,

the crowd "dislimns and leaves not a wrack behind." But fairs and

general enterprise and opulence are not coeval: neither do they flourish

in an age of iron roads and steam-carriages. In fact, they were the

results of the inconvenience attendant upon travelling. It was once

easier for goods to come to customers than for customers to leave their

homes in search of goods. Inland trade was heavily crippled by the

badness and insecurity of the highways. The carriages in which produce

was conveyed were necessarily massive and heavy in their structure, to

enable them to resist the roughness of the ways. Sometimes they were

engulfed in bogs, sometimes upset in dykes, and generally they rolled

heavily along tracks little less uneven than the roofs of houses.

As a direct result of these obstacles to speedy locomotion, the fruits of

the earth, in the winter months, when the roads were broken up or

flooded, were consumed by damp and worms in one place, while a few miles

further on they might have been disposed of at high prices. Turf was

burned in the stoves of London, long after coals were in daily use in the

northern counties; and petitions were presented to the Houses of

Parliament in the reign of Henry VIII., deprecating the destruction of

growing timber for the supply of hearth-fuel. Nor were these miry and

uneven ways by any means exempt from toll; on the contrary, the chivalry

of the Cambrian Rebecca might have been laudably exercised in clearing

the thoroughfares of these unconscionable barriers. It was a costly

day's journey to ride through the domain of a lord abbot or an acred

baron. The bridge, the ferry, the hostelry, the causeway across the

marshes, had each its several perquisite. Exportation from abroad was

oftener cheaper than production at home. It answered better to import

cloth from Flanders than to weave and bring it from York: and land

carriage from Norwich to London was nearly as burdensome as

water-carriage from Lisbon. Coals, manure, grain, minerals, and leather

were transported on the backs of cattle. An ambassador going or

returning from abroad was followed by as numerous a retinue as if he had

ridden forth conquering and to conquer. Nor were his followers merely

for state or ceremony, but indispensable to his comfort, since the horses

and mules which bore his suite carried also the furniture of his bed-room

and kitchen, owing to the clumsiness of wheel-carriages. If, as was

sometimes the case, a great lord carried half an estate on his back, he

often consumed the other half in equipping and feeding his train: and

among the pleasures utterly unknown to the world for more than five

thousand years is, that both peer and peasant may now travel from

Middlesex to any portion of the known world with only an umbrella and

carpet-bag.

We have alluded in our sketch of the earliest roads to the general

character of early travelling; but a few words in connection with roads

remain to be said on that subject. Travelling for pleasure--taking what

our grandfathers were wont to call the _Grand Tour_--were recreations

almost unknown to the ancient world. If Plato went into Egypt, it was

not to ascend the Nile, nor to study the monumental pictures of a land

whose history was graven on rocks, but to hold close colloquy on

metaphysics or divinity with the Dean and Chapter at Memphis. The Greeks

indeed, fortunately for posterity, had an incredible itch for Egyptian

yarns, and no sooner had King Psammetichus given them a general

invitation to the Delta, than they flocked thither from Athens and

Smyrna, and Cos and Sparta, and the parts of Italy about Thurium, with

their heads full of very particular questions, and often, to judge by

their reports of what they heard, with ears particularly open to any

answers the Egyptian clergy might please to give. Yet pleasure was not

the object of their journey. Science, as themselves said, curiosity, as

their enemies alleged, was the motive for their encountering perils by

land and water. Indeed we recollect only three travellers, either among

the Greeks or Romans, who can properly be considered as journeying for

pleasure. These were Herodotus--the prince of tourists, past, present,

or to come,--Paullus AEmilius, and Caesar Germanicus.

Herodotus, there is reason to suspect, did not himself penetrate far into

Asia, but gathered many of his stories from the merchants and mariners

who frequented the wine-shops of Ephesus and Smyrna. Considering the

sources of his information, and the license of invention accorded to

travellers in all ages, the Halicarnassian was reasonably sceptical: and

generally warns his readers when he is going to tell them "a bouncer," by

the words "so at least they told me," or "so the story goes." Paullus

AEmilius travelled like a modern antiquary and connoisseur. And for

beholding the master-pieces of Grecian art in their original splendour

and in their proper local habitations, never had tourist better

opportunities. A negotiation was pending between the Achaean League and

the Roman Commonwealth; and since the preliminaries were rather dull, and

Flaminius felt himself bored by the doubts and ceremonies of the

delegates, he left them in the lurch to draw up their treaty, and took a

holiday tour himself in the Peloponnesus. At that time not a single

painting, statue, or bas-relief had been carried off to Italy. The Roman

villas were decorated with the designs of Etrurian artists alone, or, at

the most, had imported their sculpture and picture galleries from Thurii

and Tarentum. Flaminius therefore gazed upon the entire mass of Hellenic

art; and the only thing he, unfortunately for us, neglected, was to keep

a journal, and provide for its being handed down to posterity.

Germanicus, who had beheld many of these marvels in the Forum and Palaces

of Rome--for the Roman generals resembled the late Marshal Soult in the

talent of appropriating what they admired--reserved his curiosity for

Egypt alone, and traversed from Alexandria to Syene the entire valley of

the Nile, listening complacently to all the legends which the priests

deemed fitting to rehearse to Roman ears. He was of course treated with

marked attention. Memnon's statue sounded its loudest chord at the first

touch of the morning ray; the priests, in their ceremonial habiliments,

read to him the inscriptions on the walls of the great Temple at

Carnac--and proved to him that after all the Roman empire was no "great

shakes;" since a thousand years before, Rameses III. had led more nations

behind his chariot, and exacted heavier tributes of corn, wine, and oil

from all who dwelt between the White Nile and the Caspian Sea. His

journey however was so unprecedented a step, that it brought him into

trouble with Tiberius. The Emperor was half afraid that Germanicus had

some designs upon the kingdom of Egypt, and as that land happened to be

the granary of Rome, the jealous autocrat thought of the possibility of

short-commons and a bread-riot in the Forum. But even if the tourist had

no ulterior views, the Emperor thought that it did not look like business

for a proconsul to be making holiday without leave,--and he accordingly

reprimanded his adopted son by letter, and scolded him in a speech to the

senate. In our days the Emperor of Russia would look equally black on a

field-marshal who should come without license to London for the season;

and the Mandarin, who lately exhibited himself in the Chinese Junk, would

do well for the future to eschew the Celestial Empire and its ports and

harbours entirely,--at least if he have as much consideration for his

personal comfort, as his sleek appearance indicated.

The Emperor Hadrian might have been added to the list of ancient

travellers in search of the picturesque, both because he visited nearly

every province of his empire, and because he expended good round sums

wherever he went, in restoring, re-edifying, or beautifying the public

edifices which the provincials had suffered to fall into decay. But

Hadrian's journeys were primarily journeys of business; he wished, like

the Czar Nicholas, to see with his own eyes how matters went on, and at

times he had the felicity of catching a prefect in the very act of

filling his pockets and squeezing the provincials: we cannot therefore

put him to the account of those who journeyed for pleasure. Every Roman

who took any part in public affairs was, in fact, a great traveller. If

he served his sixteen or twenty years in the legions, and was not

enrolled in the household troops, he was singularly unlucky if his

company were not quartered in Asia, Africa, and the Danubian provinces.

If he became praetor or consul, a provincial government awaited him at

the close of his year of office; and it depended upon the billets drawn

in the Senate, whether he spent a year or two on the shores of the

Atlantic, or whether he kept staghounds on the frontiers of Dacia.

Nearly every Roman indeed had qualified himself before he was fifty to be

a candidate for the Travellers' Club; and sometimes the fine gentleman,

who declined taking an active part in public affairs, found himself

unexpectedly a thousand miles from home, with an imperial rescript in his

portmanteau enjoining him not to return to Rome without special leave.

To such a compulsory journey was the poet Ovid condemned, apparently for

his very particular attentions to the Princess Julia. His exile was a

piece of ingenious cruelty. He was sent to Tomi, which was far beyond

the range of all fashionable bathing-places. The climate was atrocious;

the neighbourhood was worse; the wine was execrable and was often hard

frozen, and eaten like a lozenge, and his only society was that of the

barracks, or a few rich but unpolished corn-factors, who speculated in

grain and deals on the shores of the Euxine. To write verses from morn

to dewy eve was the unfortunate poet's only solace: and he sent so many

reams of elegies to Rome, that his friends came at last to vote him a

bore, and he was reduced, for want of fitting audience, to learn the

Getic language, and read his lacrymose couplets to circles of gaping

barbarians.

A few of our readers may remember the family coach in which county

magnates rode in procession to church, to Quarter sessions, and on all

occasions of ceremony and parade. The Landau, so fast disappearing from

our streets and roads, was but a puny bantling of a vehicle in comparison

with the older and more august conveyance. As the gentlemen rode on

horseback, and the ladies upon pillions, on all but the great epochs of

their lives, this wheeled mammoth was rarely drawn out of its cavern, the

coach-house. For not even when in full dress, raised from the ground by

red-heeled shoes resembling a Greek _cothurnus_, and with a cubit added

to their stature by a mural battlement of hair, did the ladies of the

eighteenth century disdain to jog soberly behind a booted butler with

pistols in his holsters, and a Sir Cloudesley Shovel beaver on his head.

{48} "We have heard an ancient matron tell of her riding nine miles to

dinner behind a portly farm bailiff, and with her hair dressed like that

of Madame de Maintenon, which, being interpreted, means that the locks

with which nature had supplied her were further aggravated by being drawn

tight over a leathern cushion--a fashion which Jonathan Oldbuck denounces

as "fit only for Mahound or Termagaunt." The production of the coach was

therefore the sign of a white or black day in the family

calendar--inasmuch as it indicated either marriage or funeral, the

approach of the Royal Judges or the execution of a state prisoner, the

drawing for the militia, or a county address to both Houses of Parliament

on the crying grievance of the Excise. It doubtless took some days to

prepare the imperator's chariot for a Roman triumph: it must have

employed nearly as many to clean and furbish the capacious body of the

modern vehicle. There was moreover a whole armoury of harness to mend

and polish; and as the six long-tailed Flemish horses were not often in

the traces together, some time was required by them to unlearn the rustic

habits of the farm-yard, and to regain the stately trot at which, where

the roads would admit of it, they ordinarily proceeded. The following

description of a journey to London by an M.P. of 1699 will convey to the

reader a lively yet tolerably exact conception both of the glory and

inconveniences of travelling in those days. It is taken from Vanbrugh's

comedy of the 'Journey to London,' better known in its modern form of

'The Provoked Husband.'

"_James_. Sir, Sir, do you hear the news? They are all a-coming.

"_Uncle Richard_. Ay, Sirrah, I hear it.

"_James_. Sir, here's John Moody arrived already: he's stumping

about the streets in his dirty boots, and asking every man he meets,

if they can tell him where he may have a good lodging for a

parliament-man, till he can hire such a house as becomes him. He

tells them his lady and all the family are coming too; and that they

are so nobly attended, they care not a fig for anybody. Sir, they

have added two cart-horses to the four old geldings, because my lady

will have it said she came to town in a coach and six--heavy George

the ploughman rides postilion.

"_U. Richard_. Very well, the journey begins as it should do. Dost

know whether they bring all the children with them?

"_James_. Only Squire Humphrey and Miss Betty, Sir; the other six

are put to board at half-a-crown a week a head, with Joan Growse at

Smoke-dunghill-farm.

"_U. Richard_. The Lord have mercy upon all good folks! What work

will these people make! Dost know when they'll be here?

"_James_. John says, Sir, they'd have been here last night, but that

the old wheezy-belly horse tired, and the two fore-wheels came crash

down at once in Waggon-rut Lane. Sir, they were cruelly loaden, as I

understand: my lady herself, he says, laid on four mail trunks,

besides the great deal-box, which fat Tom sat upon behind.

"_U. Richard_. So!

"_James_. Then, within the coach there was Sir Francis, my lady, the

great fat lap-dog, Squire Humphrey, Miss Betty, my lady's maid, Mrs.

Handy, and Doll Tripe the cook; but she puked with sitting backwards,

so they mounted her into the coach-box.

"_U. Richard_. Very well.

"_James_. Then, Sir, for fear of a famine before they should get to

the baiting-place, there was such baskets of plum-cake, Dutch

gingerbread, Cheshire cheese, Naples biscuits, maccaroons, neats'

tongues and cold boiled beef; and in case of sickness, such bottles

of usquebaugh, black-cherry brandy, cinnamon-water, sack, tent, and

strong beer, as made the old coach crack again.

"_U. Richard_. Well said.

"_James_. And for defence of this good cheer and my lady's little

pearl necklace, there was the family basket-hilt sword, the great

Turkish scimitar, the old blunderbuss, a good bag of bullets, and a

great horn of gunpowder.

"_U. Richard_. Admirable!

"_James_. Then for bandboxes, they were so bepiled up--to Sir

Francis's nose, that he could only peep out at a chance hole with one

eye, as if he were viewing the country through a perspective-glass."

The "blunderbuss, Turkish scimitar, and basket-hilt sword," in the

foregoing extract from Vanbrugh, point to one of the constant perils of

the road--the highwaymen. Lady Wronghead was lucky in bringing her

"little pearl necklace" safe to London. Turpin's scouts, a few years

later, would have obtained more accurate information of the rich

moveables packed in the squire's coach. But as yet Turpin and Bradshaw

were not. The great road from York to London however lay always under an

evil reputation. It was by this line that Jeannie Deans walked to

London, and verified the remark of her sagacious host, the Boniface of

Beverley, that the road would be clear of thieves when Groby Pool was

thatched with pancakes--and not till then. The example of Robin Hood

was, for centuries after his death, zealously followed by the more

adventurous spirits of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Yorkshire;

and their enterprising genius was well seconded by the fine breed of

horses for which those counties were famous. For cross-country work the

Leicestershire blades had no fellows; and had the Darlington Hunt existed

in those days, they would doubtless have been first a-field in the

morning and last on the road at night. Nor were there any reasons in

their dress, demeanour, or habits, why they should not consort with the

best of the shire either when riding to cover, or celebrating the

triumphs of the day afterward in the squire's hall, or the ale-house.

Some of these redressers of the inequalities of fortune were of excellent

houses,--younger sons, who having no profession--trade would have been

disgraceful in their eyes--grew weary of an unvarying round of shooting,

fishing, otter-hunting, and badger-baiting, and aspired, like their

common ancestor Nimrod, to be hunters of men. Others had found the

discipline of a regiment unpleasant, or had been unjust serving men. In

short, the road, about a century and a half ago, was the general refuge

of all who, like the recruits that flocked to King David at Adullam, were

in distress or discontented. Mail-coach drivers and guards travelled

armed to the teeth, booted to the hips, with bandeliers across their

capacious chests, and three-cornered hats which, in conjunction with

their flowing horse-hair wigs, were both sword- and bullet-proof.

Passengers who had any value for their lives and limbs, when they booked

themselves at London for Exeter or York, provided themselves with

cutlasses and blunderbusses, and kept as sharp look-out from the

coach-windows as travellers in our day are wont to do in the Mexican

diligences. We remember to have seen a print of the year 1769 in which

the driver of the Boston mail is represented in the armed guise of Sir

Hudibras. He carries a horse-pistol in his belt, and a _couteau de

chasse_ slung over his shoulder, while the guard is accoutred with no

less than three pistols and a basket-hilt sword, besides having a carbine

strapped to his seat behind the coach. Between the coachman's feet is a

small keg, which might indifferently contain "genuine Nantz" or

gunpowder. One of the "insides," an ancient gentleman in a Ramilies wig,

is seen through the capacious window of the coach affectionately hugging

a carbine, and a yeoman on the roof is at once caressing a bull-dog, and

supporting a bludgeon that might have served Dandie Dinmont himself. Yet

all these precautions, offensive or defensive, were frequently of no

avail: the gentlemen of the road were still better armed, or more adroit

in handling their weapons. Hounslow Heath on the great western road, and

Finchley Common on the great northern road, were to the wayfarers for

many generations nearly as terrible as the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

"The Cambridge scholars," says Mr. Macaulay, "trembled when they

approached Epping Forest, even in broad daylight. Seamen who had just

been paid off at Chatham were often compelled to deliver their purses at

Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years earlier by the greatest of

poets as the scene of the depredations of Poins and Falstaff." The

terrors of one generation become the sources of romance and amusement to

later times. Four hundred years ago we should have regarded William of

Deloraine as an extremely commonplace and inconvenient personage: he is

now much more interesting than the armour in the Tower, or than a captain

or colonel of the Guards. A century back we should have slept the more

soundly for the knowledge that Jack Sheppard was securely swinging in

chains; but in these piping times of peace his biography has extracted

from the pockets of the public more shillings than the subject of it

himself ever 'nabbed' on the king's highway. It is both interesting and

instructive to observe how directly the material improvements of science

act upon the moral condition of the world. As soon as amended roads

admitted of more rapid movement from place to place, the vocation of the

highway robber was at first rendered difficult, and in the end impossible

to exercise on the greater thoroughfares. Fast horse-coaches were the

first obstacle. Railways have became an insuperable impediment to "life

on the road."

Charles Lamb indited one of his most pleasant essays upon the 'Decay of

Beggars in the Metropolis.' In the rural districts vagrancy and

mendicity still survive, in spite of constabulary forces and petty

sessions. But the mendicity of the nineteenth century presents a very

different spectacle from the mendicity of the seventeenth. The

well-remembered beggar is no longer the guest of the parish-parson; the

king's bedesmen have totally vanished; no one now supplicates for alms

under a corporation-seal; nor is the mendicant regarded as second only to

the packman as the general newsmonger of a neighbourhood. Who does not

remember the description of foreign beggars in the 'Sentimental Journey'?

Many of us have witnessed the loathsome appearance and humorous

importunity of Irish mendicants. A century ago England rivalled both

France and Ireland in the number of its professional beggars. In the

days when travelling was mostly performed on horseback, the foot of the

hills--the point where the rider drew bridle--was the station of the

mendicant, and long practice enabled him to proportion his clamorous

petitions to the length of the ascent. {56} The old soldier in 'Gil

Blas' stood by the wayside with a carbine laid across two sticks, and

solicited, or rather enforced, the alms of the passer-by, by an appeal to

his fears no less than to his pity. The readers of the old drama will

recall to mind the shifts and devices of the 'Jovial Beggars;'--how

easily a wooden leg was slipped off and turned into a bludgeon; how

inscrutable were the disguises, and how copious and expressive the slang,

of the mendicant crew. Coleridge has justly described 'The Beggar's

Bush' as one of the most pleasant of Fletcher's comedies; and if the

Spanish novelists do not greatly belie the roads of their land, the

mendicant levied his tolls on the highways as punctually as the king

himself. Speed in travelling has been as prejudicial to these merry and

unscrupulous gentry as acts against vagrancy or the policeman's staff.

He should be a sturdy professor of his art who would pour forth his

supplications on a railway platform; and Belisarius himself would hardly

venture to stop a modern carriage for the chance of an _obolus_, to be

flung from its window. A few of the craft indeed linger in bye-roads and

infest our villages and streets; but _ichabod_!--its glory has departed;

and the most humane or romantic of travellers may without scruple consign

the modern collector of highway alms to the tender mercies of the next

policeman and the reversion of the treadmill.

The modern highway is seldom in a direct line. A hill, a ford, or a wood

sufficed to render it circuitous. All roads indeed through hilly

countries were originally struck out by drivers of pack-horses, who, to

avoid bogs, chose the upper ground. Roads were first made the subject of

legislation in England in the sixteenth century: until then, they had

been made at will and repaired at pleasure. A similar neglect of

uniformity may be seen in Hungary and in Eastern Europe generally, even

in the present day. The roads are made by each county, and as it depends

in great measure upon the caprice or convenience of the particular

proprietors or townships whether there shall be a road at all, or whether

it shall be at all better than a drift-way or a bridle-track, it often

happens that after bowling along for a score of miles upon a highway

worthy of Macadam, the carriage of the traveller plunges into wet turf or

heavy sand, merely because it has entered upon the boundary of a new

county. Nay, even where the roads have been hitherto good, it often

happens that the new Vicegespann, or Sheriff, a personage on whose

character a good deal depends in county business, allows them to go to

ruin for want of seasonable repairs. A similar irregularity was, in our

own country, put a stop to in the reign of Mary, when it was enacted that

each parish should maintain its own roads. A custom was borrowed from

the feudal system: the lord of the manor was empowered to demand from his

vassals certain portions of their labour, including the use of such rude

implements as were then in use. The peasant was bound by the tenure of

his holding, to aid in cutting, carting, and housing his lord's hay and

corn, to repair his bridges, and to mend his roads. A portion of such

services was, in the sixteenth century, transferred from the lord to the

parish or the district; and the charges of repairing the highways and

bridges fell upon the copyholder. He was compelled to give his labour

for six days in the year, and his work was apportioned and examined by a

surveyor. If this compulsory labour did not suffice, hired labour was

defrayed by a parochial rate: and although the obligation is seldom

enforced, yet it survives in letter in the majority of the court-rolls of

our manors.