But, as these homes lay dispersed
through all the shires of the island, and most of us disdained all
coaches except his Majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend
to so extensive a connexion with Mr. Palmer's establishment as Oxford.
Three mails, at the least, I remember as passing every day through
Oxford, and benefiting by my personal patronage--viz., the Worcester,
the Gloucester, and the Holyhead mail. Naturally, therefore, it became
a point of some interest with us, whose journeys revolved every six
weeks on an average, to look a little into the executive details of the
system. With some of these Mr. Palmer had no concern; they rested upon
bye-laws enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and upon
other bye-laws, equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the
illustration of their own haughty exclusiveness. These last were of a
nature to rouse our scorn; from which the transition was not very long
to systematic mutiny. Up to this time, say 1804, or 1805 (the year of
Trafalgar), it had been the fixed assumption of the four inside people
(as an old tradition of all public carriages derived from the reign of
Charles II) that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a
porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been
compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable
delf-ware outsides.
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