Note 399 — ACTUS IV., SCÆNA 1.

These names, which are generally considered as synonymous, appear from this passage to signify different kinds of vehicles, or different sizes of the same. About this time they were come into general use. Dr Percy, in his Notes to the "Northumberland Household Book," p. 448, says, from Anderson's "Origin of Commerce," that coaches were introduced into England by Fitz-Alan, Earl of Arundel, A.D. 1580; but from the following passage in the works of Taylor the Water-Poet, 1630, p. 240, they appear to have been used some years earlier:—"For in the yeere 1564, one William Boonen, a Dutchman, brought first the use of coaches hither, and the said Boonen was Queene Elizabeth's coachman; for indeede a coach was a strange monster in those days, and the sight of them put both horse and man into amazement: some said it was a great crabshell brought out of China, and some imagin'd it to be one of the pagan temples, in which the cannibals adored the divell: but at last those doubts were cleared, and coach-making became a substantial trade: so that now all the world may see they are as common as whores, and may be hired as easie as knights of the post." Dr Percy observes, they were first drawn with two horses, and that it was the favourite Buckingham who, about 1619, began to draw with six horses which, Wilson tells us ("Life of King James," 1653, fol. p. 130), "was wondered at then as a novelty, and imputed to him as a mastering pride." About the same time, he introduced sedan chairs.