To discover slow coaches, few methods are
more efficacious than to get well blocked up in
Fleet-street or Cheapside—the facilities for carrying
this into effect are most obligingly placed at
your disposal by the corporation— and to survey
the vehicular entanglement, from the knife-board
of an omnibus, or from over the apron
of a Hansom's cab. Of course the fast—
when the drivers have a reasonable chance
of fastness— predominate. Light carts, spring
vans, powerful railway waggons, broughams and
clarences with patent axles and noiseless wheels,
parcels delivery carts, tradesmen's carts, dog-carts,
and butchers' carts with trotting ponies,
even costermongers' shallows of which the
donkey-steeds would move their little legs rapidly
had they a clear stage and no favour in Whitechapel
or in Tottenham-court-road—tilburies,
and phaetons, and chariots, and tax-carts, and
basket-chaises: all these tell of the unmistakable
modern appetite for speed. Even the
prisoners' van is no longer a slow coach; and
once beyond Finsbury-square, that great black,
shining felony-box moves with a ponderous swiftness
Hollowaywards. But there is yet an admixture
of slow coaches among the more rapid craft.
There is that inevitable young member of the
commercial aristocracy who will drive tandem
to his wholesale haberdashery warehouse in
Gutter-lane, who is unmoved by the taunts and
threats of indignant cabmen and omnibus drivers,
and who, so long as he persists in backing when
he should advance, driving sideways when he
should drive ahead, and wearing an eye-glass,
and so long as he doesn't know what to do
with his wheeler, and isn't at all certain about
his leader, will remain a hopeless and intolerable
slow coach. I see the sad-coloured fly with the
jolting windows and the brass-door handle
viciously wrenched awry, drawn by the scraggy
horse with the switch-tail, and driven by the
methodical man in the drab gaiters and the
Berlin gloves: which fly belongs of course to the
ill-tempered old lady who takes her niece to live
with her for charity, and starves and beats her
—always for charity's sake—and who is going
to the Bank to draw her dividends. At the
slackest part of the driving day, and be the
road ever so clear, the sad-coloured fly never
moves but in a dully-plodding manner; and
if ever a passing cabman happens to flick his
whip against the window-pane, down comes
that protecting screen, and the ill-tempered
old lady puts her morose old head out and
screams after the cabman that he is a villain,
and that she will have him tried at the Old
Bailey. I see the great, dark, comfortable,
heavy hammerclothed, double-seated family
carriage, the very weight of the heraldic bearings
on whose panels would be sufficient to make it
a slow coach, and which contains eminent
bankeresses proposing to call in Lombard-
street and confer with their eminent banker-spouses,
concerning truffles and pineapples, ere
they return to Roehampton for the great dinner
of the evening. I see the goods-waggons full
of bales and barrels, which must remain slow
coaches till the end of the chapter, and which I
sincerely wish were all underground—not dead,
but buried, many fathoms deep, out of the way
of people who have business to transact, and
jogging along a comfortable subterranean railway.
Then I am aware of those minor slow
coaches, waifs and strays of laggard driving,
that will drift among the screws and paddle-wheel
steamers of modern vehicularity. Timid
old maids drive blind ponies with distressing
caution; farmers' wives from Bow, Tottenham,
Edmonton, and Brentford — places that you
might imagine to be quite close to London, but
which are in reality twenty thousand miles
away from the metropolis—jolt heavily and
draggingly along in old-fashioned chaise-carts.
Superannuated tradesmen, in rusty traps drawn
by grave fat cobs that will never win the
Cesarewitch, are the slowest of the slow. They
have nothing to do; and don't see the use of
being in a hurry. The washerwomen's carts
make no secret at all about being slow coaches.
In addition to having to stop at every sixth
door or so to take in linen, Monday, the great
opening day of laundresses, is a far more
jocund and festive season to those laborious
persons who blanch our under-garments, than
you might imagine. On Monday Mrs. Wrench,
of Clapham, meets Mrs. Boyler, of Fuiham-bridge,
on the road. Mrs. Copperblue, of
Turnham-green, exchanges the quotations of the
prices of articles per dozen with Mrs. Starcher,
from Chelsea. The superb Mrs. Minglemangle,
who "does" for so many of the aristocracy,
passes by her rival Mrs. Hangemout, who
washes for the very best of the West-end clubs,
with ineffable red-faced disdain. The washer-women's
carts are always stopping at the
corners of streets where licensed victuallers
call the attention of the public to their neat
wines and sparkling ales. I like to see
lordly Mrs. Toweller sitting in her comfortable
cart, monarch of all she surveys, plump and
ruddy among the clothes-baskets with their
heaps of linen covered with distended table-cloths,
like snow-white apple-pies. Jolly Jack
Toweller, the husband, drives. When off duty,
he does gardening jobs for a gentleman at
Hammersmith, who is benevolent, but is touched
in his head, and will paint his geraniums pea-green
when the gardener is away. I like to see
this social washerman alight, enter the hostelry,
and anon emerge, bearing the glass of sparkling
ale, or, perchance, the "drop of comfort," for
his strong-armed missus. Great joking then takes
place, and politics and scandal—mainly bearing
on the wash-tub and the ironing-board—are
discussed.

The hackney-coach! It is a grave error to
suppose that the musty old slow coach of our youth,
with the sham heraldry, the straw carpet, and the
spikes behind, is extinct. From the stands, the
hackney-coach has indeed vanished—has not
the waterman, with his low-crowned hat and
his perpetually counterbalancing water-buckets,
himself disappeared, and been replaced by an
officer in uniform? — but the hackney-coach is