[200] “Life,” ii. 245-249.
[201] These were, of course, the “Peelites”—the members who, together with their leader, had seceded from the Tory party on the Free Trade question.
[202] “Life,” ii. 225, 226.
[203] “Life,” ii. 267.
[204] “Life,” ii. 317.
[205] A medical man had now been added to the staff, the first so appointed being Dr Gavin, a much-esteemed official, who perished untimely, if I remember rightly, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, during the awful visitation there of the cholera epidemic of 1853.
[206] Afterwards diminished to eight.
[207] “Life,” ii. 298-301.
[208] “Life,” ii. 300. At this time the Post Office staff numbered over 24,000, of whom more than 3,000 served in the London district.
[209] A thirty or more years old example of this rejection returns to memory. A young man—a born soldier, and son to a distinguished officer in the Engineers—failed to pass the inevitable Army examination. The subject over which he broke down was some poem of Chaucer's, I think the immortal Prologue to The Canterbury Tales—that wonderful collection of masterly-drawn portraits of men and women who must have been living people over five hundred years ago. Even an ardent lover of him “whose sweet breath preluded those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great Elizabeth with sounds that echo still,” has never yet been able to perceive what connection the strains of “Dan Chaucer, the first warbler,” can have with the science of modern warfare. The born soldier, it was said, was fain to turn ranchman in the American Far West.