=Quiz.=--"A delightful book, by the Superintendent of the Edinburgh General Post-office.... A book, full of contemporary curiosities and old-world romances, which, while it gives an entertaining account of the inner workings of the Post-office of to-day, transports you to the grand idyllic epoch of sleepy Britain, the times of pack-horses and postboys, of wayside inns and county hostelries, of masked cavaliers, and great snows and impracticable roads. A glance at the contents of Mr Hyde's volume is sufficient to indicate the extent and variety of the materials he has gathered together."
=Birmingham Daily Mail.=--"A book which may be looked upon in the light of a historical work.... Its aim, while historic, seems to be to deal with the lighter features of the great department of the State, the Post-office. 'The Royal Mail' ... will be found very entertaining, and sometimes very strange and romantic reading."
=Practical Teacher.=--"A book which, albeit not a novel, has all the charm and interest of the most exciting romance. Altogether it would be difficult to speak too highly of Mr Hyde's delightful volume."
=Yorkshire Post.=--"Mr J. W. Hyde of Edinburgh has collected and arranged an altogether admirable array of historical and illustrative matter bearing on our postal system."
=Courant.=--"He has made a wonderfully good book. By some curious instinct he has divined what is most interesting in the subject he writes about, and there is not a dull page from the first to the last. No previous writer on the Post-office has given us so graphic a picture of its daily life, and of the adventures it undergoes from hour to hour. He has in truth written a romance of the Post-office abounding in truths stranger than fiction."
(1) Obvious punctuation and typographical errors have been rectified.
(2) Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equals=.
(3) Where there are slight differences of print style in facsimiles of actual documents, they have not been altered (e.g. "postboy", "Post-Office", etc.).
(4) In chapter XI, the table has been restructured to fit the available space and some abbreviations have been adjusted and defined.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Royal Mail, by James Wilson Hyde