Note 50 — Chapter II

The word “postage,” we are told, was originally applied to the hire of a horse for “posting,” and was extended to letters in comparatively recent times only. It is therefore well when meeting with the word in other than modern documents not to conclude too hastily that it relates to epistolary correspondence. An Act of 1764 is said to be the first in which was used “postage” in the sense of a charge upon letters. But in 1659 the item, “By postage of letters in farm, £14,000,” appears in a “Report on the Public Revenue in the Journals of the House of Commons,” vii. 627. The fact likewise seems well worth recalling that in the translation of the Bible of 1611 the words “post” and “letters” are connected, notably in “2 Chronicles,” xxx. 6, and in “Esther.” Chapter xvii. of Marco Polo's travels, by the by, contains an interesting description of the horse and foot posts in the dominions of Kubla Khan, which were so admirably organised that the journeys over which ordinary travellers spent ten days were accomplished by the posts in two.