every man by the transcendent bond of his national 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, and summoned to draw up, the
great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand
years--Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol,
Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling,
Aberdeen--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 bound off with the action and gestures of leopards? What
stir!--what sea-like ferment!--what a thundering of wheels!--what a
trampling of hoofs!--what a sounding of trumpets!--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, without
intermission, westwards for three hundred [Footnote: "_Three
hundred_":--Of necessity, this scale of measurement, to an American,
if he happens to be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous.
Accordingly, I remember a case in which an American writer indulges