A citizen, for recreation sake,
  To see the country would a journey take
  Some dozen mile, or very little more;
  Taking his leave with friends two months before,
  With drinking healths, and shaking by the hand,
  As he had travail’d to some new-found land.

  —­Doctor Merrie-Man, 1609.

The Squire has lately received another shock in the saddle, and been almost unseated by his marplot neighbour, the indefatigable Mr. Faddy, who rides his jog-trot hobby with equal zeal; and is so bent upon improving and reforming the neighbourhood, that the Squire thinks, in a little while, it will be scarce worth living in.  The enormity that has thus discomposed my worthy host, is an attempt of the manufacturer to have a line of coaches established, that shall diverge from the old route, and pass through the neighbouring village.

I believe I have mentioned that the Hall is situated in a retired part of the country, at a distance from any great coachroad; insomuch that the arrival of a traveller is apt to make every one look out of the window, and to cause some talk among the ale-drinkers at the little inn.  I was at a loss, therefore, to account for the Squire’s indignation at a measure apparently fraught with convenience and advantage, until I found that the conveniences of travelling were among his greatest grievances.

In fact, he rails against stage-coaches, post-chaises, and turnpike-roads, as serious causes of the corruption of English rural manners.  They have given facilities, he says, to every humdrum citizen to trundle his family about the kingdom, and have sent the follies and fashions of town, whirling, in coachloads, to the remotest parts of the island.  The whole country, he says, is traversed by these flying cargoes; every by-road is explored by enterprising tourists from Cheapside and the Poultry, and every gentleman’s park and lawns invaded by cockney sketchers of both sexes, with portable chairs and portfolios for drawing.

He laments over this, as destroying the charm of privacy, and interrupting the quiet of country life; but more especially as affecting the simplicity of the peasantry, and filling their heads with half-city notions.  A great coach-inn, he says, is enough to ruin the manners of a whole village.  It creates a horde of sots and idlers, makes gapers and gazers and newsmongers of the common people, and knowing jockeys of the country bumpkins.

The Squire has something of the old feudal feeling.  He looks back with regret to the “good old times” when journeys were only made on horseback, and the extraordinary difficulties of travelling, owing to bad roads, bad accommodations, and highway robbers, seemed to separate each village and hamlet from the rest of the world.  The lord of the manor was then a kind of monarch in the little realm around him.  He held his court in his paternal hall, and was looked up to with almost as much loyalty and deference as the king himself.  Every neighbourhood was a little world within itself, having its local manners and customs, its local history and local opinions.  The inhabitants were fonder of their homes, and thought less of wandering.  It was looked upon as an expedition to travel out of sight of the parish steeple; and a man that had been to London was a village oracle for the rest of his life.