[49] “History of the Post Office,” p. 18.
[50] The word “postage,” we are told, was originally applied to the hire of a horse for “posting,” and was extended to letters in comparatively recent times only. It is therefore well when meeting with the word in other than modern documents not to conclude too hastily that it relates to epistolary correspondence. An Act of 1764 is said to be the first in which was used “postage” in the sense of a charge upon letters. But in 1659 the item, “By postage of letters in farm, £14,000,” appears in a “Report on the Public Revenue in the Journals of the House of Commons,” vii. 627. The fact likewise seems well worth recalling that in the translation of the Bible of 1611 the words “post” and “letters” are connected, notably in “2 Chronicles,” xxx. 6, and in “Esther.” Chapter xvii. of Marco Polo's travels, by the by, contains an interesting description of the horse and foot posts in the dominions of Kubla Khan, which were so admirably organised that the journeys over which ordinary travellers spent ten days were accomplished by the posts in two.
[51] “History of the Post Office,” p. 18.
[52] Ibid. p. 21.
[53] In George I.'s reign, besides London, Chester is said to have been the only town in England which possessed two post offices.
[54] “History of the Post Office,” p. 37.
[55] “The ancient penny post resembled the modern penny post only in name,” says Justin M'Carthy in “A History of Our Own Times,” chap. iv. p. 99.
[56] The “New Annual Directory for 1800” (see Guildhall Library), speaking of the “Penny Post,” defines its area as “the cities of London [and] Westminster, the borough of Southwark and their suburbs.”
[57] “History of the Post Office,” pp. 37-40.
[58] Or, in his own words, mails trusted to “some idle boy without a character, mounted on a worn-out hack, who, so far from being able to defend himself against a robber, was more likely to be in league with one.” Apparently, the people of this class had no better name in France, and probably other countries, to judge by a fragment of conversation taken from Augier, and chronicled in Larousse's “Dictionnaire du XIXe Siècle,” xii. 1497:—“La poste est en retard.” “Oui, d'une heure à peu près. Le piéton prend courage à tous les cabarets.”