But a greater than Chalmers was at hand in Palmer, the organiser of the mail-coach service. Palmer accomplished, according to De Quincey, “two things very hard to do on our little planet, the earth, however cheap they may be held by eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke. He was therefore just twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing, discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of speed and keeping time; but, on the other hand, who did not marry the daughter of a duke.” Palmer married, in point of fact, Lady Madeline Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Richmond, but De Quincey does not lay the stress he should have done on his having fought his postal scheme to success against the obstinacy and red-tapeism of the Post Office officials, itself an enterprise sufficient to daunt any but the stoutest heart. Government officials have a wonderful power of passive resistance and an insensibility to argument and proof which might be envied by a lamp-post. It was thought a brilliant rejoinder when one of these Post Office dunderheads replied to Palmer’s scheme for supplanting the slow and uncertain post-boys by fast coaches with the observation that there was no reason why the post should be the swiftest conveyance in England! No doubt this witty gentleman resigned in an access of mortification when Palmer actually succeeded in being appointed Controller-General of the Post Office, with a salary of £1,500 a year and a two and a-half per cent. commission on a rise of the income above the £240,000 at which it stood when he was placed at the head of affairs. The first mail-coach was put upon the Bath Road on the 8th of August 1784, and its success was so great and immediate that the chief towns of the kingdom presently began to petition for similar facilities to be accorded them. York was the first successful applicant, and a mail was put on the road between London, York, and Edinburgh in October of the same year, taking three nights and two days to perform the journey. This was not a very remarkable rate of speed, to be sure, but the times were not so hurried then. A greater speed was attained when the roads began to be reorganised by Telford and Macadam. Macadam’s method of metalling the existing roads and Telford’s reconstruction of steep and winding highways produced great results. To Macadam was due the greater speeds attained at last on the mail route between London and Edinburgh; for, although Telford’s improved road was begun in 1824, it was never completed owing to the introduction of railways. Government had, in fact, by this time recognised the necessity of good roads, and, fresh from the reorganisation of the mail route between London and Holyhead, had determined on an improved communication between England and Scotland.