might sleep the first night at Hampton town; thus occupying; two
days in the performance of a journey of twenty-two miles in the
immediate neighbourhood of the metropolis. As late as 1736 we
find Lord Hervey, writing from Kensington, complaining that
"the road between this place and London is grown so infamously bad
that we live here in the same solitude as we would do if cast on
a rock in the middle of the ocean; and all the Londoners tell us
that there is between them and us an impassable gulf of mud."

Nor was the mud any respecter of persons; for we are informed that
the carriage of Queen Caroline could not, in bad weather,
be dragged from St. James's Palace to Kensington in less than two
hours, and occasionally the royal coach stuck fast in a rut,
or was even capsized in the mud. About the same time, the streets
of London themselves were little better, the kennel being still
permitted to flow in the middle of the road, which was paved with
round stones,--flag-stones for the convenience of pedestrians
being as yet unknown. In short, the streets in the towns and the
roads in the country were alike rude and wretched,--indicating a
degree of social stagnation and discomfort which it is now
difficult to estimate, and almost impossible to describe.


Footnotes for chapter I

*[1] Brunetto Latini, the tutor of Dante, describes a journey made
by him from London to Oxford about the end of the thirteenth
century, resting by the way at Shirburn Castle. He says,
"Our journey from London to Oxford was, with some difficulty and
danger, made in two days; for the roads are bad, and we had to