doubled again before the close of the seventeenth century. The country has kept on growing out of system after system, like a lad out of his clothes, and at different times has had new ones made to its measure. Brian Tuke's easy plan of borrowing farmers' horses on which to mount his emissaries, gave place to regular relays of post-boys and post-horses; and, in course of time, when the robbery of the mails by sturdy highwaymen had become almost the rule, and their safe conveyance the exception, post-boys were in turn supplanted by a system of stage-coaches, convoyed by an armed guard. This was thought a great advance; and so it was. A pushing, zealous man named Palmer originated the scheme. Amidst many other avocations, he found time to travel on the outside of stage-coaches, for the sake of talking with the coachmen and observing the routes, here, there, and everywhere all over England, and thus matured all the details of his plan from personal experience. "None but an enthusiast," said Sheridan in a rapture of admiration in the House of Commons, "could have conceived, none but an enthusiast could have practically entertained, none but an enthusiast could have carried out such a system." Still, in spite of the exactitude with which Palmer's scheme was declared to fit the wants of the country, it soon began to be grown out of like the rest. It became too short, too tight, too straitened every way, and impeded the circulation of correspondence,--no unimportant artery of our national system. The cost of postage was too high, the mode of delivery too slow, and the consequence was, that people either repressed their desire to write letters, or sent them through some cheaper and illegitimate channel. Sir Walter Scott knew a man who recollected the mail from London reaching Edinburgh with only a single letter. Of all the tens of thousands of the modern Babylon, only one solitary individual had got anything to say to anybody in the metropolis of the sister kingdom worth paying postage for. "We look back now," writes Miss Martineau, "with a sort of amazed compassion to the old crusading times, when warrior-husbands and their wives, grey-headed parents and their brave sons, parted with the knowledge that it must be months or years before they could hear of one another's existence. We wonder how they bore the depth of silence! And we feel the same now about the families of Polar voyagers. But, till a dozen years ago, it did not occur to many of us how like this was the fate of the largest class in our own country. The fact is, there was no full and free epistolary intercourse in the country, except between those who had the command of franks. There were few families in the wide middle class who did not feel the cost of postage a heavy item in their expenditure; and if the young people sent letters home only once a fortnight, the amount at the year's end was a rather serious matter. But it was the vast