were won in summer,) they wear, on this fine evening, these liveries exposed to view, without any covering of upper coats.  Such a costume, and the elaborate arrangement of the laurels in their hats, dilated their hearts, by giving to them openly an official connection with the great news, in which already they have the general interest of patriotism.  That great national sentiment surmounts and quells all sense of ordinary distinctions.  Those passengers who happen to be gentlemen are now hardly to be distinguished as such except by dress.  The usual reserve of their manner in speaking to the attendants has on this night melted away.  One heart, one pride, one glory, connects every man by the transcendent bond of his English blood.  The spectators, who are numerous beyond precedent, express their sympathy with these fervent feelings by continual hurrahs.  Every moment are shouted aloud by the post-office servants the great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand years,—­Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Perth, Glasgow—­expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate missions.  Every moment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the mail-bags.  That sound to each individual mail is the signal for drawing off, which process is the finest part of the entire spectacle.  Then come the horses into play,—­horses! can these be horses that (unless powerfully reined in) would bound off with the action and gestures of leopards?  What stir!—­what sea-like ferment!—­what a thundering of wheels, what a trampling of horses!—­what farewell cheers—­what redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation, connecting the name of the particular mail—­“Liverpool for ever!”—­with the name of the particular victory—­“Badajoz for ever!” or “Salamanca for ever!” The half-slumbering consciousness that, all night long and all the next day—­perhaps for even a longer period—­many of these mails, like fire racing along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at every instant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure effect of multiplying the victory itself, by multiplying to the imagination into infinity the stages of its progressive diffusion.  A fiery arrow seems to be let loose, which from that moment is destined to travel, almost without intermission, westwards for three hundred[10] miles—­northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundred fold by a sort of visionary sympathy with the approaching sympathies, yet unborn, which we are going to evoke.