for this they had some excuse in the state of facts. A man would like at
this moment to assume that Europe and Asia were listening to him; and as
some few copies of his book do really go to Paris and Naples, some to
Calcutta, there is a sort of legal fiction that such an assumption is
steadily taking root. Yet, unhappily, that ugly barrier of languages
interferes. Schamyl, the Circassian chief, though much of a savage, is not
so wanting in taste and discernment as to be backward in reading any book
of yours or mine. Doubtless he yearns to read it. But then, you see, that
infernal _Tchirkass_ language steps between our book, the darling,
and _him_, the discerning reader. Now, just such a barrier existed
for the Spectator in the travelling arrangements of England. The very few
old heavies that had begun to creep along three or four main roads,
depended so much on wind and weather, their chances of foundering were so
uncalculated, their periods of revolution were so cometary and uncertain,
that no body of scientific observations had yet been collected to warrant
a prudent man in risking a heavy bale of goods; and, on the whole, even
for York, Norwich, or Winchester, a consignment of '_Specs_' was not
quite a safe spec. Still, I could have told the Spectator who was anxious
to make money, where he might have been sure of a distant sale, though
returns would have been slow, viz., at Oxford and Cambridge. We know from
Milton that old Hobson delivered his parcels pretty regularly eighty years
before 1710. And, one generation before _that_, it is plain, by the
interesting (though somewhat Jacobinical) letters [5] of Joseph Mede, the
commenter on the Apocalypse, that news and politics of one kind or other
(and scandal of _every_ kind) found out for themselves a sort of
contraband lungs to breathe through between London and Cambridge; not
quite so regular in their _systole_ and _diastole_ as the tides of ebb and
flood, but better than nothing. If you consigned a packet into the proper
hands on the 1st of May, 'as sure as death' to speak _Scottice_, it would
be delivered within sixty miles of the capital before mid-summer. Still