=Birmingham Daily Mail.=--"A book which may be looked upon in the light of a historical work.... Its aim, while historic, seems to be to deal with the lighter features of the great department of the State, the Post-office. 'The Royal Mail' ... will be found very entertaining, and sometimes very strange and romantic reading." =Practical Teacher.=--"A book which, albeit not a novel, has all the charm and interest of the most exciting romance. Altogether it would be difficult to speak too highly of Mr Hyde's delightful volume." =Yorkshire Post.=--"Mr J. W. Hyde of Edinburgh has collected and arranged an altogether admirable array of historical and illustrative matter bearing on our postal system." =Courant.=--"He has made a wonderfully good book. By some curious instinct he has divined what is most interesting in the subject he writes about, and there is not a dull page from the first to the last. No previous writer on the Post-office has given us so graphic a picture of its daily life, and of the adventures it undergoes from hour to hour. He has in truth written a romance of the Post-office abounding in truths stranger than fiction." Transcriber's Notes: (1) Obvious punctuation and typographical errors have been rectified. (2) Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equals=. (3) Where there are slight differences of print style in facsimiles of actual documents, they have not been altered (e.g. "postboy", "Post-Office", etc.). (4) In chapter XI, the table has been restructured to fit the available space and some abbreviations have been adjusted and defined.