serving-men, they now made the best shift, and for the sake of their coach and horses had only “a butterfly page, a trotting footman, and a stiff-drinking coachman, a cook, a clerk, a steward, and a butler, which hath forced an army of tall fellows to the gatehouses,” or prisons.  Of one of the evil effects of this new fashion of coach-riding this satirist of the town wittily observes, that, as soon as a man was knighted, his lady was lamed for ever, and could not on any account be seen but in a coach.  As hitherto our females had been accustomed to robust exercise, on foot or on horseback, they were now forced to substitute a domestic artificial exercise in sawing billets, swinging, or rolling the great roller in the alleys of their garden.  In the change of this new fashion they found out the inconvenience of a sedentary life passed in their coaches.[A]

[Footnote A:  Stow, in his “Chronicles,” has preserved the date of the first introduction of coaches into England, as well as the name of the first driver, and first English coachmaker.  “In the year 1564 Guilliam Boonen, a Dutchman, became the queen’s coachman, and was the first that brought the use of coaches into England.  After a while divers great ladies, with as great jealousie of the queen’s displeasure, made them coaches, and rid in them up and down the country, to the great admiration of all the beholders; but then, by little and little, they grew usual among the nobility and others of sorte, and within twenty years became a great trade of coachmaking;” and he also notes that in the year of their introduction to England “Walter Rippon made a coche for the Earl of Rutland, which was the first coche that was ever made in England.”—­ED.]

Even at this early period of the introduction of coaches, they were not only costly in the ornaments—­in velvets, damasks, taffetas, silver and gold lace, fringes of all sorts—­but their greatest pains were in matching their coach-horses.  “They must be all of a colour, longitude, latitude, cressitude, height, length, thickness, breadth (I muse they do not weigh them in a pair of balances); and when once matched with a great deal of care, if one of them chance to die, then is the coach maimed till a meet mate be found, whose corresponding may be as equivalent to the surviving palfrey, in all respects, as like as a broom to a besom, barm to yeast, or codlings to boiled apples.”  This is good natural humour.  He proceeds —­“They use more diligence in matching their coach-horses than in the marriage of their sons and daughters.”  A great fashion, in its novelty, is often extravagant; true elegance and utility are never at first combined; good sense and experience correct its caprices.  They appear to have exhausted more cost and curiosity in their equipages, on their first introduction, than since they have become objects of ordinary use.  Notwithstanding this humorous invective on the calamity of coaches, and that “housekeeping never decayed