of meaning, in all the proceedings concerning them.  Even the outside passengers have an erect and supercilious air, as if proof against the accidents of the journey.  In fact, it seems indifferent whether they are to encounter the summer’s heat or winter’s cold, since they are borne through the air in a winged chariot.  The Mail-Carts drive up; the transfer of packages is made; and, at a signal given, they start off, bearing the irrevocable scrolls that give wings to thought, and that bind or sever hearts for ever.  How we hate the Putney and Brentford stages that draw up in a line after they are gone!  Some persons think the sublimest object in nature is a ship launched on the bosom of the ocean; but give me, for my private satisfaction, the Mail-Coaches that pour down Piccadilly of an evening, tear up the pavement, and devour the way before them to the Land’s End!

In Cowper’s time, Mail-Coaches were hardly set up; but he has beautifully described the coming in of the Post-Boy:—­

  “Hark! ’tis the twanging horn o’er yonder bridge,
  That with its wearisome but needful length
  Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon
  Sees her unwrinkled face reflected bright;—­
  He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
  With spattered boots, strapped waist, and frozen locks;
  News from all nations lumbering at his back. 
  True to his charge, the close packed load behind,
  Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
  Is to conduct it to the destined inn;
  And having dropped the expected bag, pass on. 
  He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch! 
  Cold and yet cheerful; messenger of grief
  Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
  To him indifferent whether grief or joy. 
  Houses in ashes and the fall of stocks. 
  Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet
  With tears that trickled down the writer’s cheeks
  Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,
  Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains
  Or nymphs responsive, equally affect
  His horse and him, unconscious of them all.”

And yet, notwithstanding this, and so many other passages that seem like the very marrow of our being, Lord Byron denies that Cowper was a poet!—­The Mail-Coach is an improvement on the Post-Boy; but I fear it will hardly bear so poetical a description.  The picturesque and dramatic do not keep pace with the useful and mechanical.  The telegraphs that lately communicated the intelligence of the new revolution to all France within a few hours, are a wonderful contrivance; but they are less striking and appalling than the beacon fires (mentioned by Aeschylus,) which, lighted from hill-top to hill-top, announced the taking of Troy and the return of Agamemnon.

Monthly Magazine.

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THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.