.
                                                                          Frere.
 
The times have changed in nothing more (we follow as we were wont the manuscript
of Peter Pattieson) than in the rapid conveyance of intelligence and
communication betwixt one part of Scotland and another. It is not above twenty
or thirty years, according to the evidence of many credible witnesses now alive,
since a little miserable horse-cart, performing with difficulty a journey of
thirty miles per diem, carried our mails from the capital of Scotland to its
extremity. Nor was Scotland much more deficient in these accommodations than our
rich sister had been about eighty years before. Fielding, in his Tom Jones, and
Farquhar, in a little farce called the Stage-Coach, have ridiculed the slowness
of these vehicles of public accommodation. According to the latter authority,
the highest bribe could only induce the coachman to promise to anticipate by
half-an-hour the usual time of his arrival at the Bull and Mouth.
    But in both countries these ancient, slow, and sure modes of conveyance are
now alike unknown; mail-coach races against mail-coach, and high-flyer against
high-flyer, through the most remote districts of Britain. And in our village
alone, three post-coaches, and four coaches with men armed, and in scarlet
cassocks, thunder through the streets each day, and rival in brilliancy and
noise the invention of the celebrated tyrant: -
 
Demens, qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen,
Ære et cornipedum pulsu, simularat, equorum.
 
Now and then, to complete the resemblance, and to correct the presumption of the
venturous charioteers, it does happen that the career of these dashing rivals of
Salmoneus meets with as undesirable and violent a termination as that of their
prototype. It is on such occasions that the Insides and Outsides, to use the
appropriate vehicular phrases, have reason to rue the exchange of the slow and
safe motion of the ancient Fly-coaches, which, compared with the chariots of Mr.
Palmer, so ill deserve the name. The ancient vehicle used to settle quietly
down, like a ship scuttled and left to sink by the gradual influx of the waters,
while the modern is smashed to pieces with the velocity of the same vessel
hurled against breakers, or rather with the fury of a bomb bursting at the
conclusion of its career through the air. The late ingenious Mr. Pennant, whose
humour it was to set his face in stern opposition to these speedy conveyances,
had collected, I have heard, a formidable list of such casualties, which, joined
to the imposition of innkeepers, whose charges the passengers had no time to
