advised me not to go near her. She was Walpole's greatest favorite. His Reminiscences are addressed to her in terms of the most gallant eulogy. When he was dying, at past eighty, he asked her to marry him, merely that he might make her a countess and leave her his fortune. You know that in Vivian Grey she is called Miss Otranto. I always expected that my article would put her into a passion, and I was not mistaken; but she has come round again, and sent me a most pressing and kind invitation the other day.

I have been racketing lately, having dined twice with Rogers and once with Grant. Lady Holland is in a most extraordinary state. She came to Rogers's, with Allen, in so bad a humor that we were all forced to rally and make common cause against her. There was not a person at table to whom she was not rude; and none of us were inclined to submit. Rogers sneered; Sydney made merciless sport of her; Tom Moore looked excessively impertinent; Bobus put her down with simple straightforward rudeness; and I treated her with what I meant to be the coldest civility. Allen flew into a rage with us all, and especially with Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch say, were indeed tremendous. When she and all the rest were gone, Rogers made Tom Moore and me sit down with him for half an hour, and we coshered over the events of the evening. Rogers said that he thought Allen's firing-up in defence of his patroness the best thing that he had seen in him. No sooner had Tom and I got into the street than he broke forth: "That such an old stager as Rogers should talk such nonsense, and give Allen credit for attachment to anything but his dinner! Allen was bursting with envy to see us so free, while he was conscious of his own slavery."

Her ladyship has been the better for this discipline. She has overwhelmed me ever since with attentions and invitations. I have at last found out the cause of her ill humor, or at least of that portion of it of which I was the

object. She is in a rage at my article on Walpole, but at what part of it I cannot tell. I know that she is very intimate with the Waldegraves, to whom the manuscripts. belong, and for whose benefit the letters were published. But my review was surely not calculated to injure the sale of the book. Lord Holland told me, in an aside, that he quite agreed with me, but that we had better not discuss the subject.

A note; and, by my life, from my Lady Holland : "Dear Mr. Macaulay, pray wrap yourself very warm, and come to us on Wednesday." No my good lady. I am engaged on Wednesday to dine at the Albion Tavern with the Directors of the East India Company now my servants; next week, I hope, to be my masters. Ever yours,

TO THE SAME

T. B. M.

LONDON, November 22d, 1833. MY DEAR SISTER, - The decision is postponed for a week; but there is no chance of an unfavorable result. The Chairs have collected the opinions of their brethren; and the result is, that, of the twenty-four directors, only six or seven at the most will vote against me.

I dined with the directors on Wednesday at the Albion Tavern. We had a company of about sixty persons, and many eminent military men among them. The very courteous manner in which several of the directors begged to be introduced to me, and drank my health at dinner, led me to think that the Chairs have not overstated the feeling of the court. One of them, an old Indian and a great friend of our uncle, the general, told me in plain words that he was glad to hear that I was to be in their service. Another, whom I do not even know by sight, pressed the chairman to propose my health. The chairman with great judgment refused. It would have been very awkward to have had to make a speech to them in the present circumstances.

Of course, my love, all your expenses, from the day of my appointment, are my affair. My present plan, formed after conversation with experienced East Indians, is not to burden myself with an extravagant outfit. I shall take only what will be necessary for the voyage. Plate, wine, coaches, furniture, glass, china, can be bought in Calcutta as well as in London. I shall not have money enough to fit myself out handsomely with such things here; and to fit myself out shabbily would be folly. I reckon that we can bring our whole expense for the passage within the £1200 allowed by the company. My calculation is that our cabins and board will cost £250 apiece. The passage of our servants £50 apiece. That makes up £600. My clothes and etceteras, as Mrs. Meeke1 observes, will, I am quite sure, come within £200. Yours will, of course, be more. I will send you £300 to lay out as you like; not meaning to confine you to it, by any means; but you would probably prefer having a sum down to sending in your milliner's bills to me. I reckon my servant's outfit at £50; your maid's at as much more.

be £1200.

The whole will

One word about your maid. You really must choose with great caution. Hitherto the company has required that all ladies who take maid-servants with them from this country to India should give security to send them back within two years. The reason was, that no class of people misconducted themselves so much in the East as female servants from this country. They generally treat the natives with gross insolence; an insolence natural enough to people accustomed to stand in a subordinate relation to others when, for the first time, they find a great population placed in a servile relation toward them. Then, too, the state of society is such that they are very likely to become mistresses of the wealthy Europeans, and to flaunt about in magnificent palanquins, bringing discredit on their country by the immorality of their lives

1 Mrs. Meeke was his favorite among bad novel-writers.

and the vulgarity of their manners. On these grounds the company has hitherto insisted upon their being sent back at the expense of those who take them out. The late act will enable your servant to stay in India, if she chooses to stay. I hope, therefore, that you will be careful in your selection. You see how much depends upon it. The happiness and concord of our native household, which will probably consist of sixty or seventy people, may be destroyed by her, if she should be ill-tempered and arrogant. If she should be weak and vain, she will probably form connections that will ruin her morals and her reputation. I am no preacher, as you very well know; but I have a strong sense of the responsibility under which we shall both lie with respect to a poor girl brought by us into the midst of temptations of which she cannot be aware, and which have turned many heads that might have been steady enough in a quiet nursery or kitchen in England.

To find a man and wife, both of whom would suit us, would be very difficult; and I think it right, also, to offer to my clerk to keep him in my service. He is honest, intelligent, and respectful; and as he is rather inclined to consumption, the change of climate would probably be useful to him. I cannot bear the thought of throwing any person who has been about me for five years, and with whom I have no fault to find, out of bread, while it is in my power to retain his services. Ever yours,

TO THE MARQUIS OF LANSDOWNE

T. B. M.

LONDON, December 5th, 1833.

DEAR LORD LANSDOWNE, -I delayed returning an answer to your kind letter till this day, in order that I might be able to send you definitive intelligence. Yesterday evening the directors appointed me to a seat in the council of India. The votes were nineteen for me, and three against me.

I feel that the sacrifice which I am about to make is great. But the motives which urge me to make it are quite irresistible. Every day that I live I become less and less desirous of great wealth. But every day makes me more sensible of the importance of a competence. Without a competence it is not very easy for a public man to be honest: it is almost impossible for him to be thought so. I am so situated that I can subsist only in two ways: by being in office, and by my pen. Hitherto, literature has been merely my relaxation - the amusement of perhaps a month in the year. I have never considered it as the means of support. I have chosen my own topics, taken my own time, and dictated my own terms. The thought of becoming a bookseller's hack; of writing to relieve, not the fulness of the mind, but the emptiness of the pocket; of spurring a jaded fancy to reluctant exertion; of filling sheets with trash merely that the sheets may be filled; of bearing from publishers and editors what Dryden bore from Tonson, and what, to my own knowledge, Mackintosh bore from Lardner, is horrible to me. Yet thus it must be, if I should quit office. Yet to hold office merely for the sake of emolument would be more horrible still. The situation in which I have been placed for some time back would have broken the spirit of many men. It has rather tended to make me the most mutinous and unmanageable of the followers of the Government. I tendered my resignation twice during the course of the last session. I certainly should not have done so if I had been a man of fortune. You, whom malevolence itself could never accuse of coveting office for the sake of pecuniary gain, and whom your salary very poorly compensates for the sacrifice of ease and of your tastes to the public service, cannot estimate rightly the feelings of a man who knows that his circumstances lay him open to the suspicion of being actuated in his public conduct by the lowest motives. Once or twice, when I have been defending unpopular measures in the