Her Majesty's Mails

In Scotland, all the difficulties in travelling were felt to even a greater degree than in England. There were no regular posts to the extreme north of Scotland, letters going as best they could by occasional travellers and different routes. Nothing could better show the difficulties attendant on locomotion of any sort in Scotland, than the fact that an agreement was entered into in 1678 to run a coach between Edinburgh and Glasgow, to be drawn by six horses, the journey, there and back, to be performed in six days. The distance was only forty-four miles, and the coach travelled over the principal post-road in the country! The reader has thus some idea of the difficulties which stood in the way of efficient postal communication during the seventeenth century. However much the work of the Post-Office, and the slow and unequal manner in which correspondence was distributed, may excite the scorn of the present generation, living in the days of cheap and quick postage, they must nevertheless agree with Lord Macaulay in considering that the postal system of the Stuarts was such as might have moved the envy and admiration of the polished nations of antiquity, or even of the contemporaries of our own Shakespeare or Raleigh. In Cornwall, Lincolnshire, some parts of Wales, and amongst the hills and dales of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Yorkshire, letters, it is true, were only received once a week, if then; but in numbers of large towns they were delivered two and three times a week. There was daily communication between London and the Downs, and the same privileges were extended to Tunbridge Wells and Bath, at the season when those places were crowded with pleasure-seekers.[32]