108 PRÆTERITA-I

horses were of course necessary to get any sufficient way on it; and half-a-dozen such teams were kept at every post-house. The modern reader may perhaps have as much difficulty in realizing these savagely and clumsily locomotive periods, though so recent, as any aspects of migratory Saxon or Goth; and may not think me vainly garrulous in their description.¹

The French horses, and more or less those on all the great lines of European travelling, were properly stout trotting cart-horses, well up to their work and over it; untrimmed, long-tailed, good-humouredly licentious, whinnying and frolicking with each other when they had a chance; sagaciously steady to their work; obedient to the voice mostly, to the rein only for more explicitness; never touched by the whip, which was used merely to express the driver’s exultation in himself and them,-signal obstructive vehicles in front out of the way, and advise all the

¹ [The first draft has the following additional description of the start for Dover:-

“It was a law at Herne Hill that my father’s birthday should be spent there, and that I should write him a poem upon it, and gather the first gooseberries from my own bushes for his gooseberry pie [see above, § 33]. Accordingly we never started on our tours till about the 15th of May, my father’s birthday being 10th. The beginning of the journey was therefore in the midst of hawthorn, laburnum, and lilac blossom, and the start for Dover was a wonderful thing, for all of us. With English posting on the old Dover road, one could reckon fairly on eight to nine miles an hour. Starting at eight, we could do the seventy miles by five P. M. easily. My father never would drive with four horses in sight of his sober neighbours-the second pair were always went on to wait at the foot of Greenwich Hill. But the fresh first pair used to trot down the hill and along the level of the Old Kent Road,-and that first trot through Camberwell, the turn by the pond on the Green, which was going to lead one-in a week or so-to the lake of Geneva,-the sense of pity for all the inhabitants of Peckham, who weren’t going-not proud pity, but pathetic and solemn, like the pity of lovers on their wedding day for everybody who is not being married,-the getting out to walk up Greenwich Hill, feeling that every step brought one geographically nearer to Mont Blanc,-and when we got upon Black Heath, with clear horizon, feeling that Mont Blanc really was there, in the south-east-only one couldn’t see it yet;-another walk up Shooter’s Hill-always partly confused with Gadshill, Falstaff, and Don Juan’s first sight of London-we rejoicingly taking our last sight of it for that summer and plunging down to Dartford, feeling as the horses changed that the last link with Camberwell was broken-that we were already in a new and miraculous world, in which one crowded day of glorious life was worth a year of vulgar days. As I have written once or twice already, I must write again. There are no words for such things.”

For Don Juan’s view of London from Shooter’s Hill, see canto xi. 8.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]