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history of englakd.

CHAP.

hi.

tioned by the Heads of the University, and appears to have■ excited the same sort of interest which is excited in our owntime by the opening of a new railway. The Vicechancellor,by a notice affixed in all public places, prescribed the hourand place of departure. The success of the experiment wascomplete. At six in the morning the carriage began to movefrom before the ancient front of All Souls College: and atseven in the evening the adventurous gentlemen who had runthe first risk were safely deposited at their inn in London.*The emulation of the sister University was moved; and soona diligence was set up which in one day carried passengersfrom Cambridge to the capital. At the close of the reign ofCharles the Second, flying carriages ran thrice a week fromLondon to the chief towns. But no stage coach, indeed nostage waggon, appears to have proceeded further north thanYork, or further west than Exeter. The ordinary day’sjourney of a flying coach was about fifty miles in the summer;but in winter, when the ways were bad and the nights long,little more than thirty. The Chester coach, the York coach,and the Exeter coach generally reached London in four daysduring the fine season, but at Christmas not till the sixth day.The passengers, six in number, were all seated in the car-riage. For accidents were so frequent that it would havebeen most perilous to mount the roof. The ordinary fare wasabout twopence halfpenny a mile in summer, and somewhatmore in winter.**

This mode of travelling, which by Englishmen of the pre-sent day would be regarded as insufferably slow, seemed toour ancestors wonderfully and indeed alarmingly rapid. In awork published a few months before the death of Charles the

* Anthony h Wood’s Life of himself.

** Chamberlayne’s Stale of England, 1684. See also the list of stagecoaches and waggons at the end of the book, entitled Angliae Metropolis,1690.