_Punch's_ attentive study of the curiosities of literature in advertisements relating to education continued for many years. A batch of them extracted from _The Times_ appears in the issue of August 14, 1853, and pillories the meanness of ladies who wished to secure governesses without salaries, or, as an alternative, to turn their houses into boarding schools and get assistants without paying for them. Already, some three weeks earlier, _Punch_ had quoted from _The Times_ the advertisement of an academy for young gentlemen near Richmond, in Yorkshire, where youths were "boarded, furnished with books, and instructed in whatever their future prospects might require for twenty and twenty-two guineas a year. No vacations unless desired." On this "Dotheboys Hall" in real life _Punch_ observes that while such a price for a year's food for mind and body is a miracle of cheapness, "the age of miracles has passed, and especially--after the publication of _Nicholas Nickleby_--of such miracles as this." Yet an advertisement of a school in Essex on almost precisely similar lines survived for at least forty years after _Punch's_ protest, as the present writer can testify. Nor were the claims of the underpaid official forgotten. In his "Penny Post Medal" _Punch_ endeavoured to illustrate the triumph of Rowland Hill, and waxed lyrical over his achievement, indignant over his treatment:--
Beautiful, much more beautiful, to the eye of the philosopher _Punch_, is the red coat of the Postman with his bundle of penny missives than the scarlet coat of the Life Guardsman! For the Postman is the soldier of peace--the humanizing, benevolent distributor of records of hopes, affections, tenderest associations. He is the philanthropic go-between--the cheap and constant communicant betwixt man and man.
[Illustration: ROWLAND HILL'S TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO ST. MARTIN'S-LE-GRAND]
In the Penny Post Medal _Punch_ has endeavoured to show the triumph of Rowland Hill--no Greek or Roman triumph e'er so great--carried in well-earned glory into the Post-office, Saint Martin's-le-Grand. If the beholder have any imagination, he will hear huzzaing shouts--he will hear all the street-door knockers of the kingdom for that moment instinct with joyous life, loudly knock, knock, knocking in thundering accord. Such is the triumph of Rowland Hill.