The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance

Considering the infinite drollery of the whole, the curious assortment of figures and faces; the harmonious melange of elephants, mandarins' tails, Yankee beavers, naked Indians squatted with their hindquarters in front, Cherokee chiefs with feathered tufts shaking missionaries by the hand; casks of Virginia threatening the heads of young ladies devouring their love-letters; and the old woman in the corner, with hands uplifted, blessing Lord Lichfield and Sir Rowland for the saving grace of 11d. out of the shilling, and valuing her absent husband's calamity or death as nothing in comparison with such an economy,--altogether, it may be said that this is a wondrous combination of pictorial genius, after which Phiz and Cruikshank must hide their diminished heads, for they can hardly be deemed worthy now of the inferior grade of associates and aspirants for Academic honours." All this is excessively funny, and enables us to smile; but if the grounds of condemnation were of no more solid kind, we might venture the suggestion that the envelopes had hardly a fair trial at the bar of serious public judgment. Lines on the Penny Postage. The following lines were popular about the year 1840, when Sir Rowland Hill introduced the uniform penny rate of postage. The scheme was not looked upon hopefully in all quarters, and some persons predicted an early failure for it, while others only saw in the new departure grounds for ridicule or jest. These lines, which are certainly amusing, are said to be the production of Mr James Beaton:--