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 and flood,
_systole_ and _diastole_, 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 that haughtily dispensed 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. I, as far as possible,
endeavoured 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 at that time, from the false
echoes [Footnote: "_False echoes_":--Yes, false! for the words
ascribed to Napoleon, as breathed to the memory of Desaix, never were
uttered at all. They stand in the same category of theatrical fictions