system. With some of these Mr. Palmer had no concern; they rested upon
bye-laws enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and upon
other bye-laws, equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the
illustration of their own haughty exclusiveness. These last were of a
nature to rouse our scorn; from which the transition was not very long
to systematic mutiny. Up to this time, say 1804, or 1805 (the year of
Trafalgar), it had been the fixed assumption of the four inside people
(as an old tradition of all public carriages derived from the reign of
Charles II) that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a
porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been
compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable
delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been
held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that, perhaps,
it would have required an act of Parliament to restore its purity of
blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of
treason, in that case, which _had_ happened, where all three
outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at
the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I
myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old
gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates, by
suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal
attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of
lunacy or _delirium tremens_ rather than of treason. England owes
much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her
social composition, when pulling against her strong democracy. I am not
the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed itself
in comic shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the
particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter, beckoning
them away from the privileged _salle-a-manger_, sang out, "This
way, my good men," and then enticed these good men away to the kitchen.