dreamer finds housed
within himself--occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his
brain--holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce
with his own heart--some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own
nature repeated,--still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible, even
_that_--even this mere numerical double of his own consciousness--might
be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how, if the alien nature
contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it? How,
again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are
introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself?
These, however, are horrors from the kingdoms of anarchy and darkness,
which, by their very intensity, challenge the sanctity of concealment, and
gloomily retire from exposition. Yet it was necessary to mention them,
because the first introduction to such appearances (whether causal,
or merely casual) lay in the heraldic monsters, (which monsters were
themselves introduced though playfully,) by the transfigured coachman of
the Bath mail.

GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY.

But the grandest chapter of our experience, within the whole mail-coach
service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the
news of victory. A period of about ten years stretched from Trafalgar to
Waterloo: the second and third years of which period (1806 and 1807)
were comparatively sterile; but the rest, from 1805 to 1815 inclusively,
furnished a long succession of victories; the least of which, in a contest
of that portentous nature, had an inappreciable value of position--partly
for its absolute interference with the plans of our enemy, but still
more from its keeping alive in central Europe the sense of a deep-seated
vulnerability in France. Even to tease the coasts of our enemy, to mortify
them by continual blockades, to insult them by capturing if it were but a
baubling schooner under the eyes of their arrogant armies, repeated from
time to time a sullen proclamation of power lodged in a quarter to which
the hopes of Christendom turned in secret. How much more loudly must this
proclamation have spoken in the audacity[9] of having bearded the _elite_
of their troops, and having beaten them in pitched battles! Five years of
life it was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place on a
mail-coach, when carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And it
is t