One of the most characteristic and interesting features of old English life has passed away beyond recall—the post-boy. Whatever his age he was always a boy, for he always wore the short jacket. His confrère the postillion has lasted on somewhat longer on the Continent, but he also is nearly gone. He was a picturesque feature, very different from the dapper English post-boy.
The latter figures in most old English romances. He took a part in all elopements, and was concerned in the conveyance of Queen’s Messengers with despatches; he was suspected of affording information to and furnishing opportunities for highwaymen.
Who does not remember the flight of Jingle with Miss Rachel, in “Pickwick,” and the pursuit by Mr. Wardle and Mr. Pickwick?
But the post-boy has taken more than a subsidiary part in a story, he is the hero in Smollett’s “Humphry Clinker,” and he figures as a leading part in the opera of “Le Postillon de Longjumeau.” His place now knows him no more. He is as extinct an animal as the dodo or the great auk.
The last I knew was fallen from his old estate—a slim, grey-haired man, who drove a hired carriage, but no longer mounted one of a pair of post-horses. At weddings the post-boy made his final appearance, with a white beaver hat, a yellow jacket and white breeches and top-boots, a showy individual, and poor old George Spurle, whom I knew, had appeared in his proper character on many such occasions before leaving the saddle altogether to mount the box. His jacket was of a buttercup yellow, but other colours were indulged in by these servants of the public. Humphry Clinker wore “a narrow-brimmed hat with gold cording, a cut bob [wig], a decent blue jacket, leather breeches, and a clean linen shirt, puffed above the waistband.”
Old George, like every other post-boy I have known, loved his horses. In his old age he loved them too well, spared them so much as to annoy those whom he was conveying, and who proved impatient at his walking them up the least hill, and at his frequent dismounting to ease his brute.
There was a grey mare he was specially fond of, and one night the grey got her halter twisted about her neck and was found strangled. George Spurle sat down and fairly cried. The landlord seeing him so cut up endeavoured to comfort him.
“George,” said he, “do not take on so. After all it is only a horse, and that an old one. If you had lost a wife, that would have been a different matter altogether, and there would have been some excuse for tears, but—a horse—” “Ah, maister,” replied the post-boy, “wives!—one has but to hold up the finger, and they’d come flying to you from all sides—more than you can accommodate; but an ’oss—and such a mare as this—booh!” and he burst into tears again. “Such a mare as this is not to be found again in a hurry.” When a little subdued, he explained himself: “You see, maister, ’osses cost money, good ’osses cost a power of money, but wimen wifes—they don’t cost you a ha’penny piece.”
George Spurle kept a list of all the great persons he had ridden before, and his list is before me as I write. Unhappily he has not dated his several stages, and his spelling makes his MS. sometimes hard to unravel.
For instance, “Druv the Duck of Dangle’em” apparently means le Duc d’Angoulême, and “the Count D. Parry” is le Comte de Paris. After a long list beginning with royalty, he winds up, “Members of the American legation and Van Amburgh’s lions and tigers in American vans. Lunatics and hospital patients with fractured limbs, gold bullion, convicts in vans, also naturalists and gaiests [sic] to be married, the junior of springs [sic] two months old and an aged person living ninety-four years, the oldest to the grave a hundred years and six months. Adventurers, photographers, explorers of Mont Blanck [sic] and Africa. Comercials [sic], astronomers and philosophers and popular auctioneers, Canadian rifles, American merchants, racehorses in vans with gold caps. Mackeral [sic] fish and several deans and bankers. Paupers to onions [sic], some idjots and Sir H. Seale Hayne Bart.”