But,
Mr Piper, you, who are a shrewd arithmetician,
did it never occur to you to calculate how many
fools' heads, which might have produced an idea
or two in the year, if suffered to remain in quiet,
get effectually addled by jolting to and fro in these
flying chariots of yours; how many decent countrymen
become conceited bumpkins after a cattle-show
dinner in the capital, which they could not
have attended save for your means; how many
decent country parsons return critics and spouters,
by way of importing the newest taste from Edinburgh?
And how will your conscience answer one
day for carrying so many bonny lasses to barter
modesty for conceit and levity at the metropolitan
Vanity Fair?
Consider, too, the low rate to which you reduce
human intellect. I do not believe your habitual
customers have their ideas more enlarged than one
of your coach-horses. They _knows the_ road, like
the English postilion, and they know nothing beside.
They date, like the carriers at Gadshill,
from the death of John Ostler;* the succession of
* See the opening scene of the first part of Shakspeare's
Henry IV.
guards forms a dynasty in their eyes; coachmen
are their ministers of state, and an upset is to them
a greater incident than a change of administration.
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