Nevertheless, there was to be an intermediate period, during which the charge for postage would be at the rate of fourpence for each letter, half an ounce in weight, within the entire area of the United Kingdom. This was to save the Post Office from being deluged by a flood of penny letters, for which the officials would not be all at once prepared. But on the 10th of January, 1840, the postage was fixed at the uniform rate of one penny per letter not exceeding half an ounce in weight--a limit which in 1865 was widened to one ounce. Mulready, the painter, furnished a design for an official envelope, which, however, was found to be inconvenient, and was speedily laid aside. The affixed penny stamp was introduced on the 6th of May, and the system was then fairly launched--as fairly, that is, as official jealousy would suffer it to be. Franking was abolished with the introduction of the new method; and, although the Queen was still entitled to this privilege, she immediately relinquished it, with that good feeling which has always distinguished her Majesty’s relations towards her people. The aristocracy, and others who had enjoyed the invidious right, found even the penny postage a serious addition to their expenses; but the merchant, the manufacturer, the tradesman, the middle classes generally, and the poor, were suddenly invested with a benefit of which they had long been unjustly deprived, and which proved of the highest value in all the ordinary transactions of life. Another social reform in which her Majesty and Prince Albert must have taken the deepest interest was in some degree associated with the year 1840. On the 7th of August an Act of Parliament was passed with reference to the employment of children in the sweeping of chimneys. By the terms of this Act, it was made unlawful for master-sweeps to take apprentices under sixteen years of age, and no individual under twenty-one was to ascend a chimney after July 1st, 1842. The law was made more stringent in 1864; but in the meanwhile it had done an immense amount of good. The barbarity of the system it supplanted was great indeed. Boys of tender years, whose ordinary treatment by their employers was of the roughest kind, were compelled, often by acts of extreme violence, to ascend chimneys for the purpose of brushing down the soot. Cases were known in which these poor little creatures were lost and stifled in the dark, cavernous, and winding passages which they had to thread. At the [Illustration: RECEPTION OF THE QUEEN IN HYDE PARK AFTER THE NEWS OF OXFORD’S ATTEMPT ON HER LIFE.]