and attainder:  his blood is attainted through six generations, and nothing is wanting but the headsman and his axe, the block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his horrors.  What! shall it be within benefit of clergy to delay the king’s message on the high road?—­to interrupt the great respirations, ebb or flood, of the national intercourse—­to endanger the safety of tidings, running day and night between all nations and languages?  Or can it be fancied, amongst the weakest of men, that the bodies of the criminals will be given up to their widows for Christian burial?  Now the doubts which were raised as to our powers did more to wrap them in terror, by wrapping them in uncertainty, than could have been effected by the sharpest definitions of the law from the Quarter Sessions.  We, on our parts, (we, the collective mail, I mean,) did our utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them.  Whether this insolence rested upon law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power, haughtily dispensing with that sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station; and the agent in each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as one having authority.

Sometimes after breakfast his majesty’s mail would become frisky:  and in its difficult wheelings amongst the intricacies of early markets, it would upset an apple cart, a cart loaded with eggs, &c.  Huge was the affliction and dismay, awful was the smash, though, after all, I believe the damage might be levied upon the hundred.  I, as far as possible, endeavored in such a case to represent the conscience and moral sensibilities of the mail; and, when wildernesses of eggs were lying poached under our horses’ hoofs, then would I stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated in those days from the false[5] echoes of Marengo)—­“Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep over you?” which was quite impossible, for in fact we had not even time to laugh over them.  Tied to post-office time, with an allowance in some cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, could the royal mail pretend to undertake the offices of sympathy and condolence?  Could it be expected to provide tears for the accidents of the road?  If even it seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I contended, in discharge of its own more peremptory duties.

Upholding the morality of the mail, a fortiori I upheld its rights, I stretched to the uttermost its privilege of imperial precedency, and astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this proud establishment.  Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some Tallyho or Highflier, all flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us.  What a contrast to our royal simplicity of form and color is this plebeian wretch!  The single ornament on our dark