CHAPTER XIII

WHAT BECAME OF THE COACHMEN

“Steam, James Watt, and George Stephenson have a great deal to answer for. They will ruin the breed of horses, as they have already ruined the innkeepers and the coachmen, many of whom have already been obliged to seek relief at the poor-house, or have died in penury and want.”--_The Times_, 1839.

“Where,” asked Thackeray in _Vanity Fair_, “where is the road now, and its merry incidents of life? Is there no Chelsea or Greenwich for the honest, pimple-nosed coachmen?” No, there was not. The action of Parliament in sanctioning so many railways in so short a space of time, without making any legislative restriction or provision in favour of the coachmen whose careers were ruined by railways, seems strange to the present generation, but in no single instance were they considered. The greatest and swiftest revolution ever brought about in the methods and habits of travelling took place in the short period of time between 1837, when the effect of railways first began to be felt, and 1848, when most of the great main lines were opened. Eleven years is no great space in which to effect so sweeping a change, and it is not surprising that ruin and misery were wrought by it, not among coachmen alone, but dealt out impartially to every one of the many people and interests whose prosperity was bound up with the continuance of the old order of things. Coachmen were by no means the greatest sufferers: others felt the blow as severely, but in this chapter we have no concern with the great army of innkeepers, ostlers, post-boys and stable-helpers who so suddenly found their occupation taken away and no new means of livelihood provided.

[Illustration: THE COACHMAN, 1832.

_After H. Alken._ ]

What became of the coachmen? In the vast majority of cases we do not, and cannot, know; for if one thing be more certain than another, it is that we are better informed in classic and mediæval lore than in the story of our forbears of two or three generations ago, and that most of the papers and documents necessary to a full and particular history of coaching have been destroyed.

Many among those not born in the age of coaches have marvelled at what they consider the wealth of reminiscences about the old coachmen. The truth is that there exists no such wealth. There were certainly no fewer than three thousand coachmen throughout the country in the days just before railways. What do we know of them? Very little. Even their names have been forgotten, except in some (comparatively few) special cases. No one can give us a complete list of the coachmen of the Edinburgh Mail, of the Exeter “Telegraph,” or Devonport “Quicksilver,” or of any of the crack day coaches. Nearly complete in some cases, but never quite, because the reminiscent travellers by famous mail or stage have never troubled to detail such things; caring only to narrate the peculiarly bad or good coachmanship, as the case might be, or the eccentricities in manner or dress, of the men who drove them. The merely efficient coachman, with no salient characteristics to be described enthusiastically or spitefully caricatured, stood little chance of notice in print. He drove until the natural end of his career came, or until it was cut short by the railway; and in either case ended obscurely.

On the other hand, the noted masters of the art of driving a coach, who taught the young bloods that accomplishment, or who were excellent companions with joke and song to while the hours away, have found abundant notice; and they are the chronicles of these men that make that apparent wealth of reminiscence.

The coachmen ended, as may be supposed, very variously. A generation ago, many of the city and suburban omnibuses were driven by gloomy, purple-faced men, confirmed misanthropes, who viewed the world with jaundiced eyes, and, living in vivid recollection of the past, despised themselves, their omnibuses, and the people they drove. Those were the old coachmen. The Richmond Conveyance Company, whose omnibuses in the ’sixties conveyed many Londoners between the “Goose and Gridiron,” St. Paul’s Churchyard, and that famous riverside town, employed a number of old-time coachmen, who wore tall hats with a gold band, and were never tired of telling their box-seat passengers about the open-handedness of the passengers of old, and incidentally that travellers by ’bus were “not worth a d----n”; not, perhaps, a tactful or ingratiating manner, but “out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.”

[Illustration: THE DRIVER, 1852.

_After H. Alken._ ]

When the London and South-Western Railway was opened to Richmond, in 1843, the first station-master was a former coachman and coach-proprietor, and a very notable one: no less a man, indeed, than Thomas Cooper, who had in his time run a service of coaches between London, Bath and Bristol, and had been landlord of that very fine old inn, the “Castle,” at Marlborough, now and for many years past a part of Marlborough College. Cooper’s varied enterprises on the Bath Road at last led him direct into the Bankruptcy Court. When he emerged from the official whitewashing process, Chaplin had acquired his line of coaches, and to that highly successful man he became a local manager. It was Chaplin who obtained him the position of station-master, as doubtless he had, in his influential position of director and chairman of the L. & S.W.R., already found many posts on that line for coachmen, guards, and others.

Jo Walton, the famous whip of the “Star of Cambridge,” became a messenger at Foster’s Bank in that town, after the railway had run him off. At an earlier date Dick Vaughan, of the Cambridge “Telegraph,” had been killed by being thrown out of a gig; but of him we know little. Of Thomas Cross, who was intimately connected with Cambridge, we know a good deal. He drove the Lynn “Union” for many years. Born in 1791, he died in 1877, in his eighty-sixth year. His occupancy of the box-seat lasted from 1821 to 1847, when his coaching career was brought to a close by the opening of the length of railway between Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn, His was a remarkable history. His father, John Cross, from being a highly prosperous coach-proprietor, with large estates and considerable social standing in the district between Petersfield and Portsmouth, was gradually brought low by misfortune and reckless speculations. John Cross, with the wealth and status of a country squire, had given his son Thomas an excellent education, and had destined him for the Navy; but serious attacks of epilepsy, and the results of an accident caused from falling in one of these fits on a number of wine-bottles, cut his career in the Service short. He was a midshipman when these distressing circumstances entirely altered his future. He then started farming, but misfortune dogged his steps. As owners of horses, himself and his father fared no better, for the terrible disease of glanders broke out and quickly carried off 120 animals. Eventually ruin faced the family, and Thomas Cross at last was reduced to seeking employment as a whip in the very yard once owned by his father. At the age of thirty, then, married and with a family of his own to support, we perceive him pretty thoroughly graduated in the school of life, and already familiar with the worst blows that adversity could give. In the beginning of his coaching career he drove the “Union” between London and Cambridge, but at different periods had the middle and the lower ground.

[Illustration: “A VIEW OF THE TELEGRAPH”: DICK VAUGHAN OF THE CAMBRIDGE “TELEGRAPH.”

_From an etching by Robert Dighton, 1809._ ]

He was not altogether a genial coachman, and held little intercourse with his brethren of the bench, to whom he considered himself, as indeed he was, superior. It was not, however, a judicious attitude to adopt, and those who drove the “Star” and “Telegraph” Cambridge coaches--Jo Walton, James Reynolds, and others--retorted by describing him as an indifferent whip. Perhaps, in fact, he was, but the “Lynn Union” was never a dashing coach, and gave no opportunity of displaying the skill demanded on others.

Tommy Cross was never so pleased as when he could pick up a box-seat passenger well grounded in the classics, or interested in poetry--for poetry first, and the classics afterwards, engaged his thoughts. He drove four-in-hand all day, and when his day’s work was done retired to some solitary chamber and mounted Pegasus, who carried him on the wings of the wind to the unearthly regions where dwell the spirits of Homer and Virgil. In short, he seems altogether to have lived a fine confused unpractical life, reflected to some degree in his book, _The Autobiography of a Stage-Coachman_, an interesting but formless work, so lacking in arrangement that it is difficult from its pages to gain any very clear view of his career, and actually impossible from it to discover what was the name of the Lynn coach he drove and so constantly mentions. That it was the “Union” only independent inquiries disclose. The name “Union” must in later years have taken an equivocal and prophetic meaning to poor Thomas, for, like many another coachman, he saw with apprehension railways building all over the country and running the coaches off successive roads. He knew his own turn must come, and was early seized with fears for the future. In 1843 he published, at Cambridge, in pamphlet form, some verses in imitation of Gray’s _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_. He called it _The Lament and Anticipation of a Stage-Coachman_. It was, indeed, a very doleful production, describing what was already happening on other roads and was presently to befall on this. It is not proposed to quote the sixteen pages of this poetical effort. Let two verses suffice to show at once how, if his Muse did limp unmistakably, she was not wholly destitute of descriptive force:--

[Illustration: THE GUARD, 1832.

_After H. Alken._ ]

The smiling chambermaid, she too forlorn, The boots’ gruff voice, the waiter’s busy zest, The ostler’s whistle, or the guard’s loud horn, No more shall call them from their place of rest.

Then comes the final catastrophe:--

The next we heard, some new-invented plan Had in a Union lodged our ancient friend. Come here and see, for thou shalt see the man Doom’d by the railroad to so sad an end.

The end was not yet, but the Lynn “Union” was off the road in 1847, and Cross could not obtain any form of employment on the railway. He had already, in 1846, petitioned Parliament, but without avail; and now entered upon those unhappy years in which he eked out a precarious existence on the occasional aid given him by such men as Henry Villebois, the good-hearted Norfolk sporting squire, and others who had often been passengers on the box-seat of the “Union.” In those years he published several pieces in verse, generally cast in the ambitious epic form. Unfortunately, he was not the poet he thought himself, and they are rather turgid and bombastic specimens of blank verse. He planned and wrote a _History of Coaching_, but in the bankruptcy of his printers the manuscript disappeared, and so what might have proved a really valuable work was lost. At last, in 1865, he found a home in Huggens’ College, a charitable institution at Northfleet, founded and endowed some twenty years earlier by a wealthy City merchant for gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances. This testimony to his social superiority above other coachmen seems to have cheered and invigorated him amazingly, for he was a collegian at Huggens’ beneficent institution for twelve years, and lived to be nearly eighty-six years of age.

Less fortunate was Jack Peer, or Peers, of the Southampton “Telegraph,” famous in his day, but reduced to driving an omnibus, and thence, being morose and quarrelsome in that position, by degrees to the workhouse. His unhappy situation became known to a gentleman who had often travelled by him in brighter times: a handsome subscription was raised, and he was at least enabled to end his days in quiet retirement.

A great many ex-coachmen became innkeepers and publicans. Among these was Ambrose Pickett, of the Brighton “Union” and “Item,” who anticipated the end of Brighton coaching in 1841, by becoming landlord of an inn in North Street, with the very appropriate sign of the “Coach and Horses.”

A much more famous coachman than he--Sam Hayward, of the Shrewsbury “Wonder”--followed Mr. Weller’s example, and married a widow, landlady of the “Raven and Bell,” on Wyle Cop; but he did not long survive the extinction of “the Road,” and the widow soon found herself again in that situation. John Jobson, who for many years drove the “Prince of Wales”--the “Old Prince,” as it was familiarly called--a London, Oxford and Birmingham coach, continued on to Shrewsbury and Holyhead--became a coach-proprietor, established at the “Talbot,” Shrewsbury, and a thorn in the side of Isaac Taylor, of the neighbouring “Lion.” Coaching came to an end at Shrewsbury in 1842, and the name of Jobson was heard no more.

Many coachmen were killed off the box in the exercise of their profession, as, in the chapter on accidents, has already been shown. A considerable number, secure in the affection of the wealthy amateurs, many of whom they had taught the art of driving, entered the service of those noblemen and gentlemen, in some horsy or stable capacity. The eighth Duke of Beaufort, one of the Sir Watkin Williams Wynns, and others, thus found employment for these refugees of the road, and continually aided many more; but something in the long overlordship they had exercised over four horses, and a good deal more perhaps in that hero-worship down the road, of which Washington Irving writes, had spoiled them. Their lives would not run sweetly in fresh grooves. They could not, or would not, take to new employments, and even, subsisting upon charity, were often absurdly haughty, insolent, and insufferable. Like horses, good living, coupled with little exercise, rendered them unmanageable, and they not infrequently quarrelled with the hand that fed them. “What do _you_ know about throat-lashings and head-terrets?” contemptuously asked Harry Simpson, ex-coachman of the Devonport “Quicksilver,” of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, who, before him, had been holding forth to some of his guests upon the respective merits of those harnessing methods in the old coaching days. “Nothing practically,” answered the good-humoured baronet; “my ideas are only ideas. But you know all about the subject: let us have the benefit of a professional view.”

At this time Harry Simpson--“Little Harry,” as he was called, undersized and “looking like a tomtit on a round of beef when on the driving-box”--was stud-groom to that Welsh landowner, who, from compassion, had taken him into his employ when coaching failed. “Little Harry,” domineering and wilful as he was, remained in his service for thirty years, and died in 1886.

Some of the undoubted veterans of the old order lived to patriarchal ages, and when they died their obituary notices confounded many a writer who had lightly declared, years before, that the last of the coachmen was dead.

[Illustration: THE GUARD, 1852.

_After H. Alken._ ]

Matthew Marsh, who for many years drove the Maidstone “Times,” had been a private soldier in the 14th Foot, and fought and was wounded at Waterloo. He was generally averse from mentioning that fact, but one day, hearing from his box a dispute about the battlefield in which both disputants were in error, he corrected them, simply adding, “I happened to be there.” He died in 1887, aged ninety-four years, aided in his declining days by the Earl of Albemarle, who had fought in the same campaign.

William Clements, of Canterbury, who had driven the “Tally-Ho” and “Eagle” coaches between Canterbury and London before the nineteenth century had grown out of its teens, died in 1891, aged ninety-one. He was “the last of the coachmen,” yet, two years later, in the early part of 1893, we find the death recorded of Philip (commonly called “Tim”) Carter, aged eighty-eight. He it was who drove the “Red Rover” on June 19th, 1831, from the “Elephant and Castle” to Brighton in 4 hours 21 minutes--a pace then greatly in excess of anything before accomplished on that road. The occasion was the opening of William IV.’s first Parliament, and the haste was for the double purpose of speedily carrying the King’s Speech to Brighton and of advertising the “Red Rover” itself, then a newly-established coach. He did not run light, as many of the record-making coaches used, but carried fourteen passengers on that trip.

A year after Carter’s death Harry Ward passed away, August 4th, 1894, aged eighty-one. He was one of a family of ten, and the last, except his elder brother Charles, of whom mention will presently be made. Their father had himself been a coachman on the Exeter Road, and lived at Overton at the time Charles was born. He afterwards became landlord of the “White Hart,” Hartford Bridge, on the same great highway, eighteen miles nearer London. Harry Ward’s career is partly told on page 247, Vol. I. In after years he drove coaches started in the revival on the Brighton Road and elsewhere.

“Last,” it was again said, of the coachmen who drove the famous coaches up to the time when railways ran them off the road, was Charles S. Ward, elder brother of the above. He was born in 1810, and died in his eighty-ninth year, December 9th, 1899. His was an interesting career. Son of one who had been a small proprietor as well as coachman, and thus familiar from his birth with horses, he was driving the Ipswich and Norwich Mail as far as Colchester at the early age of seventeen, and was thus probably the youngest coachman ever entrusted with the conduct of a mail on any road. But he drove it for nearly five years without an accident, and was then promoted to the Devonport “Quicksilver,” at that time the fastest out of London, nightly driving the 29 miles to Bagshot, and then back, in the small hours of the morning, with the up-coach. After nearly seven years of this night-work, trying and monotonous even in summer, but extremely hazardous in winter, he sought a change, and applied to Chaplin, who was the proprietor of the “Quicksilver,” for day-work. The very fact of his being so sure and safe a coachman on the night mail operated at first against his being transferred to a coach not calling in so great a degree for those qualities, but in 1838 he obtained the offer of the Brighton Day Mail, which Chaplin was about to start, together with the chance of horsing it a stage. Like many coachmen, ambitious of becoming a proprietor, Ward closed with this offer, but the Day Mail did not load well, and he soon gave up his share. He might have known that Chaplin, so keen a business man, was not precisely the person to offer any one else a share worth retaining.

Ward then left Chaplin, and went over to the Exeter “Telegraph,” the fast day coach run by Mrs. Ann Nelson, in opposition to Chaplin’s “Quicksilver Mail.” Mrs. Nelson was glad to get so steady a whip as Ward, who for three years from this time drove the “Telegraph” daily between Exeter and Ilminster, a double journey of 66 miles. In 1841 the Bristol and Exeter Railway, a continuation of the Great Western, was opened as far as Bridgewater, and, by consequence, the “Telegraph” was withdrawn by Mrs. Nelson and her co-partners. Ward, however, held on, and, with the coachman on the other side of his stage and the two guards, extended the journey at one end as the railway cut it short at the other. From 1841 to April 30th, 1844, the “Telegraph” therefore ran the 95 miles between Bridgewater and Devonport, taking up the railway passengers at the former place. On May 1st, 1844, the railway was opened to Exeter, and the journey of the poor old “Telegraph” was cut down to 50 miles. But those were spirited times, and even then, driven thus into the West, there were competing coaches. A “Nonpareil” Bristol and Devonport coach had been running daily at the same hours as the “Telegraph,” but was taken off, and a “Tally-Ho” put on the shorter Exeter and Devonport trip. _Then_ the racing became furious. Up out of Exeter, on to the breezy heights of Haldon, and by the skirts of Dartmoor the two coaches sped--the “Telegraph,” as Ward tells us in his reminiscences, always leading. Several times they did the 50 miles in 3 hours 20 minutes, and for months together never exceeded 4 hours!

That mad pace could not last; and so, as neither could run the other off the road, they agreed to keep it amicably for so long as the railway, pushing irresistibly onward, would suffer them to exist. On May 1st, 1848, the South Devon Railway was opened to Plymouth, and it seemed as though coaching in the West of England was quite killed; but a number of Cornish gentlemen approaching Ward with the proposal that he should start a fast coach into Cornwall, and promising to support it, he put a “Tally-Ho” on the road between Plymouth, Truro and Falmouth, a distance of 62 miles. He was so fortunate as to be offered the contract for carrying the mail between those places, and the “Tally-Ho” was converted into a mail, and ran for a number of years until the railway was opened to Truro, in May 1859. Then, and then only, did Ward’s career as a coachman end, for although for some years, being proprietor, he had seldom driven, he had not hitherto deserted the box-seat, despite the calls upon his time of the horse-mart and driving-school business he had meanwhile established at Plymouth.

Charles Ward, more fortunate, more businesslike and far-seeing than the majority of his fellows, ended as the prosperous proprietor of livery stables in the Brompton Road, in whose yard he might be seen on sunny days during his last years sitting on a bench against the warm brick wall, and dozing the afternoons away.

Even as this page is written, in January 1903, another old coachman--again “the last”!--has died. This was Sampson Brewer, who, living in his later years at Cedar Cottage, Vancouver, declared himself to be the last survivor of the old coaching days. Born in 1809, he was, therefore, ninety-four years of age at his death. He said he drove on its final journey “the last regularly-running mail in England”: that between Plymouth and Falmouth, by way of Liskeard and St. Austell. He must thus have been in the employ of Charles Ward.

[Illustration:

WILLIAM SALTER _Yarmouth Stage Coach Man_ Died October the 9th 1776 Aged 59 Years.

Here lies Will Salter honest man Deny it Envy if you can True to his Business and his trust Always punctual always just His horses coud they speak woud tell They lov’d their good old master well His up hill work is chiefly done. His stage is ended Race is run One journey is remaining still. To climb up Sions holy hill And now his faults are all forgiv’n, Elija like drive up to heaven Take the Reward of all his Pains And leave to other hands the Reins.

A STAGE COACHMAN’S EPITAPH AT HADDISCOE.]

Two, at least, of the coachmen committed suicide. One of these was Dick Vickers, who had driven the Holyhead Mail. In an evil hour he resigned the ribbons to indulge a fancy he had nursed of becoming a farmer. But farming was beyond him: he lost all his money at it, and hanged himself in one of his own barns at Tynant, near Corwen. Charles Holmes, for more than twenty years coachman and part-proprietor of the “Old Blenheim” London, Oxford and Woodstock coach, and the recipient in 1835 of a handsome present of silver plate, subscribed for by Sir Henry Peyton and many other gentlemen, committed suicide by throwing himself off a steamer into the Thames.

The question, “What became of the coachmen?” is partly answered in the subjoined collection of epitaphs and eulogies got together from far and near. First comes the early and curious one at Haddiscoe, near Lowestoft, to William Salter, said to have lost his life by falling from his coach at the foot of the hill near the churchyard, shown on the page opposite.

To this succeeds the highly interesting example in Over Wallop churchyard, Hampshire, to Skinner, the coachman of the Auxiliary Mail, upset at Middle Wallop, on the Exeter Road, by one of the wheels coming off. Skinner was killed on the spot, and the passengers injured. The inscription runs:--

Sacred to the Memory of HENRY SKINNER, a Coachman, who was killed near this place July 13th, 1814, Aged 35 years.

With passengers of every age With care I drove from Stage to Stage, Till Death’s sad Hearse pass’d by unseen, And stopt the course of my machine.

Then comes a Latin passage:--

Dum socios summa per vicos arte vehebam Mors nigra præteriit-- Machina cassa mea est.

It may be translated:--

While I was conveying various passengers with the greatest skill, Black Death intervened-- My machine is broken.

An epitaph is (or was, for most of the stones in late years have been cleared away) in Winchester Cathedral yard to the last coachman of the Winchester and Southampton stage, but no record of it has been found.

Far away, in South Shropshire, on the north side of St. Lawrence’s churchyard, Ludlow, lies John Abingdon, who died in 1817, and who, according to his epitaph, “for forty years drove the Ludlow coach to London; a trusty servant, a careful driver, and an honest man.”

His labour done, no more to town His onward course he bends; His team’s unshut, his whip’s laid up, And here his journey ends. Death locked his wheels and gave him rest, And never more to move, Till Christ shall call him with the blest To heavenly realms above.

In the same district, in the pretty churchyard of Stanton Lacy, may be found a stone to the memory of John Wilkes, of the Worcester and Ludlow Mail, killed in 1803 by its overturning in a flood. Some poetic friend inscribed this tribute:--

Alas! poor Wilkes, swift down the winding hill The horses plunged into the fatal rill. The quiv’ring bridge broke down beneath the weight, And Wilkes was flung into the foaming spate. On his prone form the coach then t ... (? toppled) o’er, And he was crushed beneath, to rise no more. No more to rise? No, no! Though here his work be ended, To Heav’n we hope his spirit hath ascended. Although on Earth his final drive be drove, He’s entered on a longer Stage above, Where, now his mortal days are past and gone-- He drives with Phœbus’ self the chariot of the Sun.

Then there is the epitaph on the driver of the coach that ran between Aylesbury and London, written by the Rev. H. Bullen, vicar of Dunton, in whose churchyard he is laid:--

Parker, farewell! thy journey now is ended, Death has the whip-hand, and with dust thou’rt blended; Thy way-bill is examined, and I trust Thy last account may prove exact and just. May He who drives the chariot of the day, Where life is light, whose Word’s the living way; Where travellers, like yourself, of every age And every clime, have taken their last stage-- The God of mercy and the God of love “Show you the road” to Paradise above.

The old whips had a whimsical way with them, and sometimes not a little pathetic as well. The road was not only the profession whence they drew their living, but it was their passion--their whole life. Thus, when a noted chaise-driver at Lichfield, one Jack Lewton, died in 1796, he was, at his last request, carried from the “Bald Buck” in that city by six chaise-drivers in scarlet jackets and buckskin breeches--the pall supported by six ostlers from the different inns. The funeral took place on August 22nd, in St. Michael’s churchyard, as near the turnpike road as possible; so that he might, as he said, enjoy the satisfaction of hearing his brother whips pass and repass.

Similar directions are said to have been left by Luke Kent, reputed to have been the first guard ever appointed to a mail-coach. The story goes that he was buried at Farlington, near Portsmouth, on the Chichester Road, and left an annual bequest to his successors on the Chichester coach, on condition that they should always sound their horns when passing the place of his interment. Diligent inquiry, however, does not disclose the fact of any one of that name lying at Farlington; but a Francis Faulkner, who died at Petersfield, May 18th, 1870, aged eighty-four years, lies in a vault in Farlington churchyard. He was a guard on the “Rocket” London and Portsmouth coach, and local gossip still tells that he left a request (perhaps also a bequest) that if ever stage-coaches should pass his vault, their horns should be sounded. Certainly, a few years ago, when a coach was run from Brighton to Portsmouth, its horn was always sounded on passing the churchyard.

A conclusion shall be made with the eulogy of Robert Pointer, coachman on the Lewes stage, which he is said to have driven thirty years without an accident. It does not appear what relation he was to the one-time famous “Bob Pointer,” of the Oxford Road, and in 1834 on the Brighton “Quicksilver”--a favourite coaching tutor. _That_ Bob Pointer, according to the Duke of Beaufort, could always be depended on to start sober, but the horses had to be changed on the way anywhere but at public-houses, if it was desired that he should end his journey in the same condition:--

Those who excel, whatever line ’tis in, Deserve applause, and ought applause to win. Pointer in coachmanship superior shone; His whip his sceptre, and his box his throne. Not skilled alone the fiery steeds to guide, For them in sickness and in health provide, He, by a thousand nice _minutiæ_, knew To win the restive, and the fierce subdue. As man and master, punctual and approved; By those who knew him best, the best beloved. Many’s the time and oft, o’er Ashdown’s plain, ’Mid show’rs of driving snow and pelting rain; When hurricanes bow’d down the lofty grove, When all was slough beneath and storms above; And oft, when glowing skies cheer’d all the scene And threw o’er Sussex plains a joy serene; When now the anecdote, and now the song Beguil’d the moments as we roll’d along; Snug at his elbow have I mark’d his skill To rein the courser and to guide the wheel; And had he Phaëton’s proud task begun, To drive the rapid chariot of the sun, Safe through its course the flaming car had run.

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