claimed by the representative of the country now the general focus of attraction and theme of conversation,- Schleswig-Holstein. HRZGL POST 1 SCHILLING ORT. 0-4 S.R.MX The stamp under survey is but a poor substitute for the provisional issue of 1851 -quite a unique pattern. The present reminds us both of the oldest and actual blues of Denmark. Like the former, it has a white circular centre containing the value, which is one schilling and a quarter current; but the rest of the stamp is almost identical with the latter; having Post above; value beneath; F. R. M. on the right; and H. R. Z. G. L. on the left; post-horns in each corner. We do not comprehend why the value is marked 14 schilling in the centre, and 4 S. R. M. below. The colour is bright blue on white paper. It would seem, from the adoption of the Danish type, that the postal authorities in the revolted provinces at least have Danish proclivities, or they would surely have re-issued the original provisional stamps, or something akin to them. Mount Brown's manual gives the date of the issue of the latter as 1848; but Mons. Berger Levrault names 1851, which is the more probable, as Denmark itself did not employ stamps until the latter date. A representation is here given of one of the old provisional Schleswig-Holstein stamps, of which there were two values, the blue one schilling, and the red two schilling. An engraving is subjoined of a handsome envelope stamp of one of the private offices of New York. It has not been hitherto catalogued, as far as we can ascertain. The stamp is oval, containing embossed eagle in centre, with inscription around: Boyd's City Post, 39, Fulton St., Corner of Pearl. There are two precisely alike, except in colour; one being white bossed on red; the other is buff on blue. em The values are not noted, and may perhaps be different. Next comes a new emission of Hamburg. This time the local government favours us with a legitimate representative. The design of the stamp is a variation from, but no improvement on, the well-known series. The background is nearly filled with colour, in lieu of being white, which tends to confuse the outline of the castle; and the value, 14, disfigures it still more. The graceful curves of the upper and lower scrolls in the pre-existing series give place to a simple crescent ab ve, and straight border below. Each upper corner bears a cross. The colour is mauve on white. A new value for Costa Rica came over by the last mail. It is precisely like the former stamps, except, of course, in colour, which is bright orange, and monetary worth, un peso. Thurn and Taxis North presents us with a silbergroschen, black on white; as well as the long-anticipated 2 silbergroschen blue, in lieu of pink. In future the 5 schilling envelope of Mecklenburg is to be brown, not blue; and doubtless the adhesive will follow suit. An engraving of one of the stamps of the Ionian Islands, which in all probability will become eventually one of the 'has beens,' is subjoined. We heard a juvenile maniac lamenting that the actual and probable decease of the kings of Bavaria and Wurtemburg will not tend to increase his numerical amount; the arms of those countries not requiring a change, as would be the case were the sovereigns' heads on their stamps. The duffers to which we alluded in the beginning of this article, we need scarcely add, emanate from Hamburg. They are not professedly intended to deceive; but are published by Spiro Brothers as imitations, for the benefit of those who cannot procure the originals. There is no objection to this, in the same way as connoisseurs are obliged to content themselves with copies of the old masters; but unless collectors are very care ful, they will be liable to be imposed upon by unprincipled vendors, who will avail themselves of these counterfeits to foister upon the unwary. We would suggest to the Messrs. Spiro that they ought, for the sake of clearing themselves from any suspicion of encouraging roguery, to imprint their name on the back of every specimen. We see the large Brazil stamps figure in the list, price threepence each! These are most probably the imitations alluded to by an esteemed correspondent on the continent, whose communication we print elsewhere. We are just in time to describe a complete series of the new issue of Spanish stamps, of this year's date, one of which was figured in the number for March. They are no improvement on the preceding series, the colours being dull and the engraving poor. There are six, as before. Two cuartos, indigo on a pale lilac-tinted paper; previously noted; 12 c., green on dirty flesh colour; 19 c., brownish violet on dull lilac ; 1 real, brown on dingy red; and 2 r., blue, on pale dirty violet. 4 C., THE PRESS ON THE RETIREMENT OF SIR ROWLAND HILL. THE bearer of a great and honoured name is passing, not into obscurity, but into deserved repose. There was a Rowland Hill who used to draw to a modest meeting-house all the great and all the good in the land, and while he was preaching and praying another bearer of the name was fighting in the Peninsula. Then there came a third Rowland Hill. He had his forerunner-the mere shadow of the coming man-in the shape of one Robert Wallace, who for many years plagued all his friends and acquaintances in the House of Commons with what was considered an absurd plan for a uniform penny postage. In what precise relation he stood to Rowland Hill we know not, but the man of one idea passed away, and the man who added to that one idea a few others, with ways and means besides, took his place, and achieved a very great social revolution, as we call such changes in these days. At his beck the House of Commons shut its eyes, and adopted, blindfold, a penny postagenot a penny postage at once; it had not quite pluck enough for that; but a fourpenny postage first, and a penny postage immedi ately afterwards. Of course, there were people who said the revenue of the postoffice would be destroyed, and that people could not or would not write more letters, especially when they had to prepay them. Even if the letters multiplied, the penny would never pay the expenses. It was proved, in fact as such things are always proved that the increased expense must be in the smaller ramifications of the system, and that the ramification cost more than a However, the experiment penny a letter. was tried. But before we ask how it answered, we must follow the example of all historians, who, before they enter upon a period of change, describe the previous state of things. The historian of the Reformation must give a chapter to the corruptions of Popery, and the historian of the Reformed House of Commons must describe the Rotten Boroughs. In this instance how shall we describe the previous state of things in such a way as to move the hard hearts of young gentlemen and ladies just beginning to care more for one another than for themselves, but not as yet caring for anything else in the world? Well, in those days, boys and girls, at school and at college, or at home, had nothing to do with postage. The servant paid the postman at the door, and the charge went into the bill or the house book, and so accumulated into monthly, or quarterly, or yearly grumblings, except, indeed, that sometimes the postmasters had detected, or thought they had detected, that a letter had an enclosure, in which case, though it were the merest fragment-even a bit of silver paper, or a rose leaf, or a butterfly's wingthe postage was doubled, and then ensued an energetic remonstrance with the postmaster, backed with strong language, and sometimes stronger asseveration. But one of the first trials of life and of temper in those days was when a young gentleman or young lady of limited allowance was away from home on a visit. Every day the servant brought in eightpenny, ninepenny, tenpenny, one-and-eightpenny letters, to be paid in ready money. If a lady had good correspondents at home, several schoolfellows who cared for her, relations and people whom she had lately seen, or was likely soon to see, she might easily have four or five letters a day. Many a lady will remember that she would have to pay sometimes 8s. 6d. for one budget, and that after a month she would have to write home for another £5 note on account of her letters alone. This was a serious inroad on a small allowance. It was considered no small addition to the rank and position of a legislator that he had a large allowance for what was supposed to be public correspondence. He could frank as many letters as he was likely to write himself, and, if he did not write many, could help his friends. A frank was more than doubly valuable, for it would carry a large extra weight, and was a delicate way of saving postage to those who really could not afford it. A frank among the letters was always an agreeable incident; it saved your money; it suggested aristocratic associations; and, perhaps, the autograph itself was interesting. There were good creatures who sold their day's allowance of franks-the many said more than their allowance--at the stationer's or the hair-dresser's, where they could be bought if you wanted to write to a friend without inflicting a heavy postage. Nobody prepaid in those days except to a downright pauper. Thus those were days of letters, not notes. Where it was an object to save they were written on foolscap sheets, in the finest of hands, crossed, sometimes corner-wise, sometimes in red ink. All the margins, and spaces, and turn-overs were stuffed with P.S. and additions by other hands, for a letter was often a joint-stock undertaking. A wish to give the most for ninepence led to a diffuse, circumstantial style, and preposterous as it may seem in these days, the so-called letters from Moscow, or Munich, or Italy which constitute the form of some volumes, but occupy severally a dozen or twenty pages, are no exaggerations of the letters which any post might bring forty years ago. Young ladies sat up hours after midnight writing letters up to the worth of their postage. Almost every letter was liable to the redundancies of style and of matter said to distinguish those who speak because they have to say something from those who speak because they have something to say. You could not ask a bare question or give a bare answer without throwing in something to compensate for the fine of ninepence you were inflicting on your friend. People who read the correspondence of the last century often wonder how anybody could sit down to write all that twaddle and gossip. They forget that it cost money as well as time, and had to be made money's worth in quantity if not always in quality. A lord or an M.P. might ask a question, or announce a fact, because he did it gratis, but an unprivileged commoner could not do so without inflicting possibly more loss than the question was worth. The immense descriptions of scenery, of dress, of personal peculiarities and household arrangements, and other infinite details, if they do not date from the days of tenpenny letters, certainly received from them a peculiar dilatation. We will leave others to describe the inconveniences suffered by the poor, who were often positively unable to pay a letter out of the post-office, though from a child at the antipodes. Let others, too, enlarge on the ruinous postage of merchants and tradesmen, and the shifts to which they were driven, often not honest, to give trifling matters of information to their numerous correspondents and customers at a moderate expense. The Such was the state of things before the Penny Postage. To Mr. Rowland Hill we owe the adoption of the idea, its success, and its practical development. Upon the simple foundation of the QUEEN's head-in fact, a paper penny affixed to the letter-has been built a Postal Reform, which vies with any other reform in this reforming age. new facilities engrafted on this simple stem are like the gigantic branches of a king of the forest, each itself a tree. The several features of this wide-spreading and still growing change are enumerated in a paper before us with terse and simple brevity. They are the Penny Postage throughout the British Isles; the proportionately cheap rate of postage to all foreign countries, our colonies and our dependencies; the charge by weight; the almost universal resort to prepayment; simplicity of management and accounts; the book-post, now a most multifarious and ubiquitous affair; cheaper registration of letters; cheaper money orders; more frequent and rapid communications wherever at all possible; a vastly wider rural distribution; very many more free deliveries; postal treaties with foreigners; sorting of letters in transitu; prompter despatch and delivery; the division of the metropolis into ten postal districts, and the great acceleration of the deliveries; and, lastly, a great improvement in the pay, the condition, and the prospects of the servants of the postoffice. Now, of course, so much could not have been done without railways, but it was Mr. Rowland Hill who, before the London and Birmingham line was finished, saw what railways ought to do for us, and how such improvements could be made good servants instead of bad masters. The results are well known; the revenue has more than recovered itself, though the post is the least of our business expenses, and the cheapest of our luxuries; more than sixteen millions sterling pass yearly through the money-order office; that old sin of contraband letter-carrying, into which the best people were often tempted, is now obsolete; a savings-bank has been engrafted on the post-office-the harbinger, Mr. Rowland Hill believes, of many other useful measures; and England has the gratification of having set an example which the whole civilized world has spontaneously and cheerfully followed. It would be difficult to name so great a work so quietly and thoroughly done. It has not been without immense labour of thought and trial of patience; and Mr. Hill pays a warm and generous tribute to the many public servants by whom he has been assisted, and without whom he could not have achieved his Herculean task. Both he and they have deserved well of their country, and every time we receive a budget of letters, not over voluminous, and not compelling us to dive into our pocket for so much as one penny, we of this generation, at least, are bound to remember that we owe it to a man who had the eyes to see an immense opening for improvement when others could not see it, and the confidence in himself and his country to be certain that it had only to be attempted and would soon be done, with a good many other improvements in its train.—The Times. Ir is with keen regret we learn that the state of his health and the advice of his physicians have obliged Sir Rowland Hill to resign the secretaryship of the General Post-office, and to retire from the public service, if not in a critical or dangerous condition, at all events a worn-out and exhausted man, still retaining, indeed, all the inclination and intellectual capacity to be useful, but with a shattered nervous system-the consequence of long and unsparing work, which has established in his case also that discordance between mind and body under which too many of the best servants of the public break down. To compliment Sir Rowland Hill on his retirement from a career of benefit to his country, and, through England, to the world, is superfluous, when every postman's ring, answered by finding letters, journals, pamphlets, patterns, &c., in our door-receiver, associates, and will keep associated, his name with one of the constant comforts and conveniences of life. We do but anticipate the public regret at losing a servant who united the capacity of devising the largest plans of improvement with the ability of carrying out their smallest and nicest details; whose desire for, and study of further amendment was continuous and incessant; who allowed no personal mortification or disappointment, no ungracious criticism or jealous obstructiveness, to impede his course; who regarded difficulties only as something to be overcome, and who bequeaths to his successors ample and well prepared materials for acquiring distinction and doing the country further service. Calm, self-reliant, indefatigable, resolved, Sir Rowland Hill went on, until nature and strength would no longer respond to his efforts. Six months ago the Government suggested a period of repose, trusting again to have the continued benefit of his exertions; but repose has not brought back the wonted vigour, and Sir Rowland, feeling that his time for work was over, has conscientiously accepted the warning, and, without reference to pecuniary interest, has retired, leaving a name identified with ever present familiar benefits, and claims on the nation which it is for the public, in its own interests, to enforce. The great and good works accomplished in the postal department of the state by Sir Rowland Hill will well bear comparison with the result of any other public servant's career, and for them the nation, as it hopes to be well and faithfully served, has on his retirement to thank their author, and to take care that its gratitude is not recorded in mere words.-Daily News. WITH these memorials of his triumphs before him-with the consciousness of having given the best years of his life to the service of a public which, though by no means too cognisant of his deserts, would gladly have done more for its benefactor had there been a precedent for such an official sentence as Detur digniori-and with the gratitude and respect of his countrymen-Sir Rowland Hill resigns his office and retires into private life. Though this step will come unexpectedly upon the public, we must confess that we have for some time been prepared for it, and rather wondered that it had not come sooner. The public will miss from the department the individual to whom it really owes the postoffice as we now know it; and the community, therefore, will watch with jealousy to ascertain how much it is to lose by the change. The next occupant of the vacancy will have to face serious difficulties, not the least being the severe standard by which he will be judged; hence policy will dictate more than ordinary care in selecting the successor, not merely that he may fulfil the duties without reproach, but that the mistrust out of doors may as much as possible be disarmed by the choice itself. It may, indeed, be an ulterior question how far the services of the late secretary may be rendered still available, for it is manifest that that is an advantage which might be secured in various ways. But whatever may happen to the public weal, there is one point on which most persons will just now feel a deeper interest, and that is the welfare of Sir Rowland Hill himself, personally and individually. It is always hard to part with an old friend; but when that friend has been so signal a benefactor-when the warmth of gratitude is literally deepened by a lively sense of future favours,' cut short by the unpleasant word, farewell-the regret is all the more keen and painful; and we can only hope that by his retirement Sir Rowland will gain, in rest and happiness, a tithe as much as his country will lose.-Daily Telegraph. IN a minute dated 11th of March, the Lords of the Treasury, after recapitulating the long and useful services of Sir Rowland Hill, award him, in lieu of the usual retiring allowance, his full salary of £2000 per annum for life. CORRESPONDENCE. THE PORTRAIT ON THE MEXICAN STAMP. To the Editor of the STAMP-COLLECTOR'S MAGAZINE.' DEAR SIR,In reply to the question of one of your correspondents, I beg to inform you that the portrait on the Mexican stamp is the 'head of Curate Hidalgo, who raised the first cry of Mexican independence, on the 16th of September, 1810, in the village of Dolores, near Guanaxuato,' -so I am informed by my friend, Mr. Glennie, the British cousul in Mexico." Yours truly, British Museum. J. E. GRAY. To the Editor of the 'STAMP-COLLECTOR'S MAGAZINE.' SIR, I have just been informed that some post-marked counterfeits of the large series of Brazilians are in circulation. They are easily recognized on observing that the lines forming the framework of the stamp, which in the originals are very fine, are rather coarse in the forgeries, which is also the case throughout the pattern. In a word, once aware of the existence of the false, the first glance of the eye will readily detect its variation from the real. I am, Sir, yours obediently, France. B. HOW TO PREVENT THE SALE OF FORGED To the Editor of the 'STAMP-COLLECTOR'S MAGAZINE.' SIR, I have been a collector of something all my daysand I am not a very young man-and am now collecting postage stamps. To my regret, and I fear sometimes damage, forgeries have abounded of whatever I did collect -yes, even of shells, by filing, &c. Now it has occurred to me that the sale, therefore the production, of forgeries of postage stamps might be much stayed by collectors purchasing only on warranty; since if a forgery was sold warranted genuine the seller might be punished for obtaining money under false pretences. Thus collectors may secure themselves; therefore of such as decline to do so, I say they are rightly served if imposed on. Perhaps you will give a place to this in your number for April. Truly yours, Douglas, Isle of Man. A SUBSCRIBER. |