THE YOUTH’S CABINET

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Carriages in Olden Time.

T is amusing. to look back a few
hundred years on the pages of his-
tory, and take a note of the way
our ancestors did things. We can

scarcely help laughing, for instance, at
the parade they made about the intro-
duction of carriages. In the year 1564,
a man by the name of Booneu, a Dutch-
man, became Queen Elizabeth’s coach-
man; and he, it is said, was the first to
bring the use of coaches into England.
After a while, certain ladies of the court
followed the example of the queen, and
procured carriages for their use. Eliza-
beth did not like it, however. She was
jealous of the ladies. However, it was
not long after this, before the nobility
pretty generally rode in carriages.

At this early day, the coachman did
not usually sit on the coach, but on the
back of the horse. You see how they
managed, by the picture at the head of
this article. Before the close of the six-
teenth century, however, the modern
mode of driving became the more com-
mon one,

Toward the end of the reign of Eliza-
beth, the use of coaches had spread all

had become so plenty, that some people
thought, as many people now-a-days
think, in relation to other improvements,
that they ought to be put down. So
a bill was proposed in Parliament, “to
restrain the excessive use of coaches
within this realm of England.” The
bill did not pass, I believe; but it had a
good many supporters, strange as it
may seem. You will, perhaps, wonder
what could be the objections of our an-
cestors to the use of coaches. They
were such as these: “that they endan-
gered life in the streets; that they en-
couraged idleness and luxury; that they
increased the poverty of the poor; and
that they destroyed the trade of the
London watermen, a numerous class of
citizens.”

In 1623, a satirical pamphlet was
written about coaches, by John Taylor,
sometimes called the “water poet,” a
name he obtained from having once been
a waterman. This pamphlet was very
severe. The incensed man called the
coaches all manner of hard names. The
title of the satire was “The World on
Wheels.” The book is embellished, if

over the realm. In the year 1601, they | that term can be used in this connection,