ROMANCE OF THE POSTAGE STAMP.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10010, 5 April 1910, Page 4

ROMANCE OF THE POSTAGE STAMP.

In these comfortable times of rapid and easy inter-communication, when one drops a formal business letter, a tenderly-worded billet doux, or an inconsequential postcard into the ever-gaping maw of a scarlet iron box at any street cornner, with the certainty of its being whisked away in safety to the other side of the globe within a few weeks, it is seldom that enquiry is made into i the genesis of a system which has proved one of the most potent factors in the promotion of the higher civilisation in whicti we are participants to-day. Who invented the postage stamp? A writer in "Cham ber's Journal" has rescued the answer from the accumulating dust of oblivion. The germ of the idea dates back to the seventeenth century, when, in 1653, the Comte de Nogent and Sieur de Villayer, obtained from Louis XIV. the privilege of establishing post boxes in various quarters of Paris. Narrow strips or bands of paper, somewhat resembling the stumped newspaper wrappers of our own time, hearing a certain inscrip- ! tion and a private mark of De VilI layer's were on sale. These were fas•t'nel round the letter, which was placed in a receptacle provid d for the purpose, and the mail was collected and distributed in the usual way. Probably elaborating the De Villayer idea, Rowland Hill, the father of the world's postage system as it is known to-day, invented the adhesive postage stamp in 1837. As part of his great scheme, uniform penny postage came into being in England in 1840. An attempt to popularise embossed envelopes, bearing an elaborate allegorical design by William Mulready, R.A., failed ignominiously. Mulready's work lent itself easily to unmerciful caricature, literary and pictorial, and this unfortunate facility probably hastened the end of the idea. At all events public opinion of the first half of the nineteenth century showed a marked preference for the convenient little adhesive scraps of paper, and has remained unshaken in its predilection ever since despite the spasmodic attempts that have been made at intervals to disturb the popularity of the postage stamp, which plays so | large a part in the economy of i things to-day. at the end of ten ! years af'er he introduction of ! Rowland Hill's stamp, only thirteen foreign countries had adopted the invention, but during the fifties numerous converts were made, until by 1860 there were eigtity-five countries, that had issued postage stamps. To-day it is accounted the ] hall-mark of civilised respectability j for a country to set itself up in the > postal business, and the accessions during the last half-century have been at once the delight and despair of worshipping at the shrine of philately- !