The first serious blow struck the postal system was that which it received from the Emperor Maximilian. He established a post between Austria and Normandy, and, as a sort of retaliatory measure, made it an espionage over his subjects through the medium of their correspondence, and also for the purpose of enriching himself by the profits of the enterprise. Fortunately, however, for the cause of justice and of letters, Maximilian died before he had inflicted this great wrong on the people to any extent. He died January 12, 1519.
Having brought the reader to this point of our postal history, it may not be out of place before we reach the fifteenth century—when it assumed a very different aspect—to give some account of the earlier history of art, pastoral life, language, writing materials, letters, &c., more or less connected with our subject.
II.
Nihil Sub Sole Novi.
“There is nothing new under the sun.” “There is no new thing,” says Solomon, “under the sun.”
We cannot speak of any thing, either of a useful or ornamental character, but we invariably cast our eyes over the ages of the world and trace up, or rather back, to its earliest period, their very origin. There is scarcely an art or a science of which we boast now but owes its existence to the past ages. We have the proofs on their paintings, their mechanics, their arts, and sciences: these are the evidences to prove how far they had advanced in knowledge before the world’s revolutions cast them back again to ignorance and gloom. With the downfall of cities—crumbling away under the fiat of the Almighty, or swallowed up by earthquakes—went the genius of ages; and from their ruins and the debris of classic temples came those traces of high art of which no other living evidences bore witness. The secret went down amid their tottering ruins, and left to after-ages the simple task of imitating their monumental sculptured beauties and fresco painting on the shattered walls of their ruined temples.
Well, then, may we exclaim with Solomon,
“There is no new thing under the sun.”
George R. Gliddon, in his great work of “Ancient Egypt,” speaking of the state of the arts in the earliest ages of Egyptian history, says:—