So
also did the designs for the next book, the _Coaching Days and Coaching
Ways_ of Mr. Outram Tristram, 1888. Here Mr. Thomson had a topographical
collaborator, Mr. Herbert Railton, who did the major part of the very
effective drawings in this kind. But Mr. Thomson's contributions may
fairly be said to have exhausted the "romance" of the road. Inns and
inn-yards, hosts and ostlers and chambermaids, stage-coachmen,
toll-keepers, mail-coaches struggling in snow-drifts, mail-coaches held
up by highwaymen, overturns, elopements, cast shoes, snapped poles, lost
linch-pins,--all the episodes and moving accidents of bygone travel on
the high road have abundant illustration, till the pages seem almost to
reek of the stableyard, or ring with the horn.[30] And here it may be
noted, as a peculiarity of Mr. Thomson's conscientious horse-drawing,
that he depicts, not the ideal, but the actual animal. His steeds are
not "faultless monsters" like the Dauphin's palfrey in _Henry the
Fifth_. They are "all sorts and conditions" of horses; and--if truth
required it--would disclose as many sand-cracks as Rocinante, or as many
equine defects (from wind-gall to the bolts) as those imputed to that
unhappy "Blackberry" sold by the Vicar of Wakefield at Welbridge Fair to
Mr, Ephraini Jenkinson.
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