Her Majesty's Mails

FOOTNOTES: [196] In this category we suppose the reviewer placed the following letter addressed to the Secretary of the Post-Office, from Lord Cranworth when Lord Chancellor. We adduce it here, on the contrary, as a specimen of a handsome and manly apology: "Sir,--Complaints were made early last month, that a letter posted by Mr. Anderson, of Lincoln's Inn, and addressed to me, had never reached its destination.... You caused inquiry to be made.... I feel it a duty to you, Sir, and the Post-Office authorities, to say that I have just found the missing letter, which has been accidentally buried under a heap of other papers. I have only to regret the trouble which my oversight thus caused, and to take the earliest opportunity of absolving all persons, except myself, of blame in the matter. I have, &c. &c. CRANWORTH." Somewhat similar to the above case, occurring only last year, we may refer to the circumstance, probably in the memory of most of our readers, when, among a batch of complainants whose letters The Times admitted to its columns, was one from the late Mr. John Gough Nicholls, the eminent littérateur, who grieved bitterly that a letter sent through the post to him had not arrived at his address. From a manly apology which he made to the Post-Office authorities a few days afterwards, also given in The Times, it appeared that the reason why he never received the letter was, that it had not been sent through the Post-Office, as it ought to have been, but was delivered by a private messenger at another house in the street.