Then come the horses into play. Horses! can these
be horses that bound off with the action and gestures of leopards? What
stir!--what sea-like ferment!--what a thundering of wheels!--what a
trampling of hoofs!--what a sounding of trumpets!--what farewell
cheers--what redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation, connecting
the name of the particular mail--"Liverpool for ever!"--with the name
of the particular victory--"Badajoz for ever!" or "Salamanca for ever!"
The half-slumbering consciousness that all night long, and all the next
day--perhaps for even a longer period--many of these mails, like fire
racing along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at every instant
new successions of burning joy, has an obscure effect of multiplying
the victory itself, by multiplying to the imagination into infinity the
stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to be let
loose, which from that moment is destined to travel, without
intermission, westwards for three hundred [Footnote: "_Three
hundred_":--Of necessity, this scale of measurement, to an American,
if he happens to be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous.
Accordingly, I remember a case in which an American writer indulges
himself in the luxury of a little fibbing, by ascribing to an
Englishman a pompous account of the Thames, constructed entirely upon
American ideas of grandeur, and concluding in something like these
terms:--"And, sir, arriving at London, this mighty father of rivers
attains a breadth of at least two furlongs, having, in its winding
course, traversed the astonishing distance of one hundred and seventy
miles.
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