settled, parties formed into new combinations, and new questions under discussion. I shall then be able, without the scandal of a violent separation, and without exposing myself to the charge of inconsistency, to take my own line. In the meantime I shall save my family from distress; and shall return with a competence honestly earned, as rich as if I were Duke of Northumberland or Marquess of Westminster, and able to act on all public questions without even a temptation to deviate from the strict line of duty. While in India, I shall have to discharge duties not painfully laborious, and of the highest and most honorable kind. I shall have whatever that country affords of comfort or splendor; nor will my absence be so long that my friends, or the public here, will be likely to lose sight of me.

The only persons who know what I have written to you are Lord Grey, the Grants, Stewart Mackenzie, and George Babington. Charles Grant and Stewart Mackenzie, who know better than most men the state of the political world, think that I should act unwisely in refusing this post; and this though they assure me, and, I really believe, sincerely, that they shall feel the loss of my soci ety very acutely. But what shall I feel? And with what emotions, loving as I do my country and my family, can I look forward to such a separation, enjoined, as I think it is, by prudence and by duty? Whether the period of my exile shall be one of comfort, and, after the first shock, even of happiness, depends on you. If, as I expect, this offer shall be made to me, will you go with me? I know what a sacrifice I ask of you. I know how many dear and precious ties you must, for a time, sunder. I know that the splendor of the Indian Court, and the gayeties of that brilliant society of which you would be one of the leading personages, have no temptation for you. I can bribe you only by telling you that, if you will go with me, I will love you better than I love you now, if I

can.

I have asked George Babington about your health and mine. He says that he has very little apprehension for me, and none at all for you. Indeed, he seemed to think that the climate would be quite as likely to do you good as harm.

All this is most strictly secret. You may, of course, show the letter to Margaret, and Margaret may tell Edward; for I never cabal against the lawful authority of husbands. But further the thing must not go. It would hurt my father, and very justly, to hear of it from anybody before he hears of it from myself; and if the least hint of it were to get abroad, I should be placed in a very awkward position with regard to the people at Leeds. It is possible, though not probable, that difficulties may arise at the India House; and I do not mean to say any thing to any person who is not already in the secret till the directors have made their choice, and till the king's pleasure has been taken.

And now think calmly over what I have written. I would not have written on the subject even to you till the matter was quite settled, if I had not thought that you ought to have full time to make up your mind. If you feel an insurmountable aversion to India, I will do all in my power to make your residence in England comfortable during my absence, and to enable you to confer instead of receiving benefits. But if my dear sister would consent to give me, at this great crisis of my life, that proof, that painful and arduous proof, of her affection which I beg of her, I think that she will not repent of it. She shall not, if the unbounded confidence and attachment of one to whom she is dearer than life can compensate her for a few years absence from much that she loves.

Dear Margaret! She will feel this. Consult her, my love, and let us both have the advantage of such advice as her excellent understanding, and her warm affection for us, may furnish. On Monday next, at the latest, I expect to be with you. Our Scotch tour under these cir

cumstances, must be short. By Christmas it will be fit that the new councillor should leave England. His functions in India commence next April. We shall leave our dear Margaret, I hope, a happy mother.

Farewell, my dear sister. You cannot tell how impatiently I shall wait for your answer. T. B. M.

TO MACVEY NAPIER

LONDON, October 21st, 1833. DEAR NAPIER, -I am glad to learn that you like my article. I like it myself, which is not much my habit. Very likely the public, which has often been kinder to my performances than I was, may on this, as on other occasions, differ from me in opinion. If the paper has any merit, it owes it to the delay of which you must, I am sure, have complained very bitterly in your heart. I was so thoroughly dissatisfied with the article as it stood at first that I completely rewrote it; altered the whole arrangement; left out ten or twelve pages in one part; and added twice as many in another. I never wrote anything so slowly as the first half, or so rapidly as the last half.

You are in an error about Akenside, which I must clear up for his credit, and for mine. You are confounding the Ode to Curio and the Epistle to Curio. The latter is generally printed at the end of Akenside's works, and is, I think, the best thing that he ever wrote. The Ode is worthless. It is merely an abridgment of the Epistle, executed in the most unskilful way. Johnson says, in his Life of Akenside,1 that no poet ever so much mistook

1" Akenside was one of the fiercest and the most uncompromising of the young patriots out of Parliament. When he found that the change of administration had produced no change of system, he gave vent to his indignation in the Epistle to Curio, the best poem that he ever wrote; a poem, indeed, which seems to indicate that if he had left lyrical composition to Gray and Collins, and had employed his powers in grave and elevated satire, he might have disputed the preeminence of Dryden." (Macaulay's Essay on Horace Walpole.)

his powers as Akenside, when he took to lyric composition. "Having," I think the words are, "written with great force and poignancy his Epistle to Curio, he afterward transformed it into an ode only disgraceful to its author."

When I said that Chesterfield1 had lost by the publication of his Letters, I of course considered that he had much to lose; that he has left an immense reputation, founded on the testimony of all his contemporaries of all parties, for wit, taste, and eloquence; that what remains of his parliamentary oratory is superior to anything of that time that has come down to us, except a little of Pitt's. The utmost that can be said of the letters is that they are the letters of a cleverish man; and there are not many which are entitled even to that praise. I think he would have stood higher if we had been left to judge of his powers as we judge of those of Chatham, Mansfield, Charles Townshend, and many others - only by tradition, and by fragments of speeches preserved in parliamentary reports.

I said nothing about Lord Byron's criticism on Walpole, because I thought it, like most of his lordship's criticism, below refutation. On the drama Lord Byron wrote more nonsense than on any subject. He wanted to have restored the unities. His practice proved as unsuccessful as his theory was absurd. His admiration of The Mysterious Mother was of a piece with his thinking Gifford and Rogers greater poets than Wordsworth and Coleridge. Ever yours truly, T. B. MACAULAY.

TO HANNAH MORE MACAULAY

LONDON, November - 1833. DEAR HANNAH, -Things stand as they stood, except that the report of my appointment is every day spreading more widely, and that I am beset by advertising dealers,

1" Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation of posterity than he would have done if his Letters had never been published."

begging leave to make up a hundred cotton shirts for me and fifty muslin gowns for you, and by clerks out of place begging to be my secretaries. I am not in very high spirits to-day, as I have just received a letter from poor Ellis, to whom I had not communicated my intentions till yesterday. He writes so affectionately and so plaintively that he quite cuts me to the heart. There are few, indeed, from whom I shall part with so much pain; and he, poor fellow, says that, next to his wife, I am the person for whom he feels the most thorough attachment, and in whom he places the most unlimited confidence.

On the eleventh of this month there is to be a dinner given to Lushington by the electors of the Tower Hamlets. He has persecuted me with importunities to attend and make a speech for him, and my father has joined in the request. It is enough, in these times, Heaven knows, for a man who represents, as I do, a town of a hundred and twenty thousand people, to keep his own constituents in good humor; and the Spitalfields weavers and Whitechapel butchers are nothing to me. But, ever since I succeeded in what everybody allows to have been the most hazardous attempt of the kind ever made-I mean, in persuading an audience of manufacturers, all Whigs or Radicals, that the immediate alteration of the corn laws was impossible I have been considered as a capital physician for desperate cases in politics. However to return from that delightful theme, my own praises - Lushington, who is not very popular with the rabble of the Tower Hamlets, thinks that an oration from me would give him a lift. I could not refuse him directly, backed as he was by my father. I only said that I would attend if I were in London on the eleventh; but I added that, situated as I was, I thought it very probable that I should be out of town.

I shall go to-night to Miss Berry's soirée. I do not know whether I told you that she resented my article on Horace Walpole so much that Sir Stratford Canning