nuisances, to robbers by night, to rats, to fire.  But the mail laughs at these terrors.  To robbers, the answer is packed up and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard’s blunderbuss.  Rats again! there are none about mail-coaches, any more than snakes in Van Troil’s Iceland; except, indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who always hides his shame in the “coal cellar.”  And, as to fire, I never knew but one in a mail-coach, which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an obstinate sailor bound to Devonport.  Jack, making light of the law and the lawgiver that had set their faces against his offence, insisted on taking up a forbidden seat in the rear of the roof, from which he could exchange his own yarns with those of the guard.  No greater offence was then known to mail-coaches; it was treason, it was laesa majestas, it was by tendency arson; and the ashes of Jack’s pipe, falling amongst the straw of the hinder boot, containing the mail-bags, raised a flame which (aided by the wind of our motion) threatened a revolution in the republic of letters.  But even this left the sanctity of the box unviolated.  In dignified repose, the coachman and myself sat on, resting with benign composure upon our knowledge—­that the fire would have to burn its way through four inside passengers before it could reach ourselves.  With a quotation rather too trite, I remarked to the coachman,—­

  ——­“Jam proximus ardet
  Ucalegon.”

But recollecting that the Virgilian part of his education might have been neglected, I interpreted so far as to say, that perhaps at that moment the flames were catching hold of our worthy brother and next-door neighbor Ucalegon.  The coachman said nothing, but, by his faint sceptical smile, he seemed to be thinking that he knew better; for that in fact, Ucalegon, as it happened, was not in the way-bill.

No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the indeterminate and mysterious.  The connection of the mail with the state and the executive government—­a connection obvious, but yet not strictly defined—­gave to the whole mail establishment a grandeur and an official authority which did us service on the roads, and invested us with seasonable terrors.  But perhaps these terrors were not the less impressive, because their exact legal limits were imperfectly ascertained.  Look at those turnpike gates; with what deferential hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our approach!  Look at that long line of carts and carters ahead, audaciously usurping the very crest of the road.  Ah! traitors, they do not hear us as yet; but as soon as the dreadful blast of our horn reaches them with the proclamation of our approach, see with what frenzy of trepidation they fly to their horses’ heads, and deprecate our wrath by the precipitation of their crane-neck quarterings.  Treason they feel to be their crime; each individual carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation