Allen was a man of a modest and retiring habit, but with the greatest confidence in himself. He needed all his confidence, and all the untiring industry and vigilance that were his, for when three years of the seven had expired he found himself a loser by a small amount, and when the contract lapsed, his gain was quite inappreciable. Yet he renewed it for another seven years, convinced that the better facilities he had provided for the carriage of letters must needs lead to great developments. He was right: the correspondence of the country grew, and in 1741 we find him bidding £17,500 per annum for another term of seven years. He continued thus until his death in 1764, in receipt, for many years, of an income of not less than £12,000 a year on his post-office enterprise alone.
POSTAL SERVICES
Those were the times of the real post-boys. All letters were carried by mounted messengers, since the stage-coaches then running (where they existed at all!) were not fast enough, frequent enough, or sufficiently safe for the purpose. A side-light is thrown upon the average “speed” of these stage-coaches, not then considered speedy enough, by the onerous condition in Allen’s contract that the mails were to be carried by his post-boys “at not less than five miles an hour.”
Allen was in the forefront of Bath enterprise, and was associated with John Wood, the elder of the two architects of that name, in rebuilding the city. Before their time it had been a place of mean streets and winding alleys, the out-at-elbows remains of Gothic times. As a result of their labours, and the labours of their immediate successors, Bath renewed her youth in a revived Classicism. Among the monuments of that time, Prior Park is conspicuous. It was built by John Wood in 1743 for Allen, whose great object in erecting this veritable palace was to demonstrate the qualities of the building-stone on his Combe Down property. Here he entertained some of the foremost literary men of his time: Pope, Fielding, Warburton; and is enshrined by Fielding as “Squire Allworthy” in “Tom Jones,” and by Pope in the lines—
“Let low-born Allen, with ingenuous shame,
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”
The situation, and the front elevation of Prior Park, form together, perhaps, the noblest grouping of classic architecture and romantic scenery to be found in England. It was a time tinged with romanticism of an artificial kind which generally showed itself in affected and objectionable ways. But this artificiality was a matter of deportment merely. Literature was practised then, and Architecture flourished in the land.
PRIOR PARK.
“SHAM CASTLE”