Chapter VI: 1834-1838 (3)

The idea had been started of paying authors to write books in the languages of the country. On this Macaulay remarks

"To hire four or five people to make a literature is a course which never answered and never will answer, in any part of the world. Languages grow. They cannot be built. We are now following the slow but sure course on which alone we can depend for a supply of good books in the vernacular languages of India. We are attempting to raise up a large class of enlightened natives. I hope that, twenty years hence, there will be hundreds, nay thousands, of natives familiar with the best models of composition, and well acquainted with Western science. Among them some persons will be found who will have the inclination and the ability to exhibit European knowledge in the vernacular dialects. This I believe to be the only way in which we can raise up a good vernacular literature in this country."

These hopeful anticipations have been more than fulfilled. Twice twenty years have brought into existence, not hundreds or thousands, but hundreds of thousands, of natives who can appreciate European knowledge when laid before them in the English language, and can reproduce it in their own. Taking one year with another, upwards of a thousand works of literature and science are published annually in Bengal alone, and at least four times that number throughout the entire continent. Our colleges have more than six thousand students on their books, and two hundred thousand boys are receiving a liberal education in schools of the higher order. For the improvement of the mass of the people, nearly seven thousand young men are in training as Certificated Masters. The amount allotted in the budget to the item of Public Instruction has increased more than seventy-fold since 1835; and is largely supplemented by the fees which parents of all classes willingly contribute when once they have been taught the value of a commodity the demand for which is created by the supply. During many years past the generosity of wealthy natives has to a great extent been diverted from the idle extravagance of pageants and festivals, to promote the intellectual advancement of their fellow-countrymen. On several different occasions, at a single stroke of the pen, our Indian universities have been endowed with twice, three times, four times the amount of the slender sum which Macaulay had at his command. But none the less was he the master-engineer, whose skill and foresight determined the direction of the channels, along which this stream of public and private munificence was to flow for the regeneration of our Eastern Empire.

It may add something to the merit of Macaulay's labours in the cause of Education that those labours were voluntary and unpaid; and voluntary and unpaid likewise was another service which he rendered to India, not less durable than the first, and hardly less important. A clause in the Act of 1833 gave rise to the appointment of a Commission to inquire into the jurisprudence and jurisdiction of our Eastern Empire. Macaulay, at his own instigation, was appointed President of that Commission. He had not been many months engaged in his new duties before he submitted a proposal, by the adoption of which his own industry and the high talents of his colleagues, Mr. Cameron and Sir John Macleod, might be turned to the best account by being employed in framing a Criminal Code for the whole Indian Empire. "This Code," writes Macaulay, "should not be a mere digest of existing usages and regulations, but should comprise all the reforms which the Commission may think desirable. It should be framed on two great principles, the principle of suppressing crime with the smallest possible amount of suffering, and the principle of ascertaining truth at the smallest possible cost of time and money. The Commissioners should be particularly charged to study conciseness, as far as it is consistent with perspicuity. In general, I believe, it will be found that perspicuous and concise expressions are not only compatible, but identical."

The offer was eagerly accepted, and the Commission fell to work. The results of that work did not show themselves quickly enough to satisfy the most practical, and, (to its credit be it spoken,) the most exacting of Governments; and Macaulay was under the necessity of explaining and excusing a procrastination, which was celerity itself as compared with any codifying that had been done since the days of Justinian.

"During the last rainy season,--a season, I believe, peculiarly unhealthy,--every member of the Commission, except myself, was wholly incapacitated for exertion. Mr. Anderson has been twice under the necessity of leaving Calcutta, and has not, till very lately, been able to labour with his accustomed activity. Mr. Macleod has been, till within the last week or ten days, in so feeble a state that the smallest effort seriously disordered him; and his health is so delicate that, admirably qualified as he is, by very rare talents, for the discharge of his functions, it would be imprudent, in forming any prospective calculation, to reckon on much service from him. Mr. Cameron, of the importance of whose assistance I need not speak, has been, during more than four months, utterly unable to do any work, and has at length been compelled to ask leave of absence, in order to visit the Cape for the recovery of his health. Thus, as the Governor-General has stated, Mr. Millett and myself have, during a considerable time, constituted the whole effective strength of the Commission. Nor has Mr. Millett been able to devote to the business of the Commission his whole undivided attention.

"I must say that, even if no allowance be made for the untoward occurrences which have retarded our progress, that progress cannot be called slow. People who have never considered the importance and difficulty of the task in which we are employed are surprised to find that a Code cannot be spoken of extempore, or written like an article in a magazine. I am not ashamed to acknowledge that there are several chapters in the Code on which I have been employed for months; of which I have changed the whole plan ten or twelve times; which contain not a single word as it originally stood; and with which I am still very far indeed from being satisfied. I certainly shall not hurry on my share of the work to gratify the childish impatience of the ignorant. Their censure ought to be a matter of perfect indifference to men engaged in a task, on the right performance of which the welfare of millions may, during a long series of years, depend. The cost of the Commission is as nothing when compared with the importance of such a work. The time during which the Commission has sat is as nothing compared with the time during which that work will produce good, or evil, to India.

"Indeed, if we compare the progress of the Indian Code with the progress of Codes under circumstances far more favourable, we shall find little reason to accuse the Law Commission of tardiness. Buonaparte had at his command the services of experienced jurists to any extent to which he chose to call for them; yet his legislation proceeded at a far slower rate than ours. The French Criminal Code was begun, under the Consulate, in March 1801; and yet the Code of Criminal Procedure was not completed till 1808, and the Penal Code not till 1810. The Criminal Code of Louisiana was commenced in February 1821. After it had been in preparation during three years and a half, an accident happened to the papers which compelled Mr. Livingstone to request indulgence for another year. Indeed, when I remember the slow progress of law reforms at home, and when I consider that our Code decides hundreds of questions, every one of which, if stirred in England, would give occasion to voluminous controversy and to many animated debates, I must acknowledge that I am inclined to fear that we have been guilty rather of precipitation than of delay."

This Minute was dated the end of January, 1837; and in the course of the same year the Code appeared, headed by an Introductory Report in the shape of a letter to the Governor-General, and followed by an Appendix containing eighteen notes, each in itself an essay. The most readable of all Digests, its pages are alive with illustrations drawn from history, from literature, and from the habits and occurrences of everyday life. The offence of fabricating evidence is exemplified by a case which may easily be recognised as that of Lady Macbeth and the grooms; ["A, after wounding a person with a knife, goes into the room where Z is sleeping, smears Z's clothes with blood, and lays the knife under Z's pillow; intending not only that suspicion may thereby be turned away front himself, but also that Z may be convicted of voluntarily causing grievous hurt. A is liable to punishment as a fabricator of false evidence."] and the offence of voluntary culpable homicide by an imaginary incident of a pit covered with sticks and turf, which irresistibly recalls a reminiscence of Jack the Giant-killer. The chapters on theft and trespass establish the rights of book owners as against book stealers, book borrowers, and book defacers, with an affectionate precision which would have gladdened the heart of Charles Lamb or Sir Walter Scott. ["A, being on friendly terms with Z, goes into Z's library, in Z's absence, and takes a book without Z's express consent. Here, it is probable that A may have conceived that he had Z's implied consent to use Z's books. If this was A's impression, A has not committed theft."

"A takes up a book belonging to Z, and reads it, not having any right over the book, and not having the consent of any person entitled to authorise A so to do. A trespasses.

"A, being exasperated at a passage in a book which is lying on the counter of Z, snatches it up, and tears it to pieces. A has not committed theft, as he has not acted fraudulently, though he may have committed criminal trespass and mischief."] In the chapter on manslaughter, the judge is enjoined to treat with lenity an act done in the first anger of a husband or father, provoked by the intolerable outrage of a certain kind of criminal assault. "Such an assault produced the Sicilian Vespers. Such an assault called forth the memorable blow of Wat Tyler." And, on the question whether the severity of a hurt should be considered in apportioning the punishment, we are reminded of "examples which are universally known. Harley was laid up more than twenty days by the wound which he received from Guiscard;" while "the scratch which Damien gave to Louis the Fifteenth was so slight that it was followed by no feverish symptoms." Such a sanguine estimate of the diffusion of knowledge with regard to the details of ancient crimes could proceed from no pen but that of the writer who endowed schoolboys with the erudition of professors, and the talker who, when he poured forth the stores of his memory, began each of his disquisitions with the phrase, "don't you remember?"

If it be asked whether or not the Penal Code fulfils the ends for which it was framed, the answer may safely be left to the gratitude of Indian civilians, the younger of whom carry it about in their saddle-bags, and the older in their heads. The value which it possesses in the eyes of a trained English lawyer may be gathered from the testimony of Macaulay's eminent successor, Mr. Fitzjames Stephen, who writes of it thus:

"In order to appreciate the importance of the Penal Code, it must be borne in mind what crime in India is. Here, in England, order is so thoroughly well established that the crime of the country is hardly more than an annoyance. In India, if crime is allowed to let to a head, it is capable of destroying the peace and prosperity of whole tracts of country. The mass of the people in their common moods are gentle, submissive, and disposed to be innocent; but, for that very reason, bold and successful criminals are dangerous in the extreme. In old days, when they joined in gangs or organised bodies, they soon acquired political importance. Now, in many parts of India, crime is quite as uncommon as in the least criminal parts of England; and the old high-handed systematised crime has almost entirely disappeared. This great revolution (for it is nothing less) in the state of society of a whole continent has been brought about by the regular administration of a rational body of criminal law.

"The administration of criminal justice is entrusted to a very small number of English magistrates, organised according to a carefully-devised system of appeal and supervision which represents the experience of a century. This system is not unattended by evils; but it is absolutely necessary to enable a few hundred civilians to govern a continent. Persons in such a position must be provided with the plainest instructions as to the nature of their duties. These instructions, in so far as the administration of criminal justice is concerned, are contained in the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure. The Code of Criminal Procedure contains 541 sections, and forms a pamphlet of 210 widely printed octavo pages. The Penal Code consists of 510 sections. Pocket editions of these Codes are published, which may be carried about as easily as a pocket Bible; and I doubt whether, even in Scotland, you would find many people who know their Bibles as Indian civilians know their Codes."

After describing the confusion and complication of the criminal law of our Indian Empire before it was taken in hand by the Commission of 1834, Mr. Stephen proceeds to say:

"Lord Macaulay's great work was far too daring and original to be accepted at once. It was a draft when he left India in 1838. His successors made remarks on it for twenty-two years. Those years were filled with wars and rumours of wars. The Afghan disasters and triumphs, the war in Central India, the wars with the Sikhs, Lord Dalhousie's annexations, threw law reform into the background, and produced a state of mind not very favourable to it. Then came the Mutiny, which in its essence was the breakdown of an old system; the renunciation of an attempt to effect an impossible compromise between the Asiatic and the European view of things, legal, military, and administrative. The effect of the Mutiny on the Statute-book was unmistakable. The Code of Civil Procedure was enacted in 1859. The Penal Code was enacted in 1860, and came into operation on the 1st of January 1862. The credit of passing the Penal Code into law, and of giving to every part of it the improvements which practical skill and technical knowledge could bestow, is due to Sir Barnes Peacock, who held Lord Macaulay's place during the most anxious years through which the Indian Empire has passed. The Draft and the Revision are both eminently creditable to their authors; and the result of their successive efforts has been to reproduce in a concise, and even beautiful, form the spirit of the law of England; the most technical, the most clumsy, and the most bewildering of all systems of criminal law; though I think, if its principles are fully understood, it is the most rational. If anyone doubts this assertion, let him compare the Indian Penal Code with such a book as Mr. Greaves's edition of Russell on Crimes. The one subject of homicide, as treated by Mr. Greaves and Russell, is, I should think, twice as long as the whole Penal Code; and it does not contain a tenth part of the matter."

"The point which always has surprised me most in connection with the Penal Code is, that it proves that Lord Macaulay must have had a knowledge of English criminal law which, considering how little he had practised it, may fairly be called extraordinary. [Macaulay's practice at the bar had been less than little, according to an account which he gave of it at a public dinner: "My own forensic experience, gentlemen, has been extremely small; for my only recollection of an achievement that way is that at quarter sessions I once convicted a boy of stealing a parcel of cocks and hens."] He must have possessed the gift of going at once to the very root of the matter, and of sifting the corn from the chaff to a most unusual degree; for his Draft gives the substance of the criminal law of England, down to its minute working details, in a compass which, by comparison with the original, may be regarded as almost absurdly small. The Indian Penal Code is to the English criminal law what a manufactured article ready for use is to the materials out of which it is made. It is to the French 'Code Penal,' and, I may add, to the North German Code of 1871, what a finished picture is to a sketch. It is far simpler, and much better expressed, than Livingstone's Code for Louisiana; and its practical success has been complete. The clearest proof of this is that hardly any questions have arisen upon it which have had to be determined by the courts; and that few and slight amendments have had to be made in it by the Legislature."

Without troubling himself unduly about the matter, Macaulay was conscious that the world's estimate of his public services would be injuriously affected by the popular notion, which he has described as "so flattering to mediocrity," that a great writer cannot be a great administrator; and it is possible that this consciousness had something to do with the heartiness and fervour which he threw into his defence of the author of "Cato" against the charge of having been an inefficient Secretary of State. There was much in common between his own lot and that of the other famous essayist who had been likewise a Whig statesman; and this similarity in their fortunes may account in part for the indulgence, and almost tenderness, with which he reviewed the career and character of Addison. Addison himself, at his villa in Chelsea, and still more amidst the gilded slavery of Holland House, might have envied the literary seclusion, ample for so rapid a reader, which the usages of Indian life permitted Macaulay to enjoy. "I have a very pretty garden," he writes, "not unlike our little grass-plot at Clapham, but larger. It consists of a fine sheet of turf, with a gravel walk round it, and flower-beds scattered over it. It looks beautiful just now after the rains, and I hear that it keeps its verdure during a great part of the year. A flight of steps leads down from my library into the garden, and it is so well shaded that you may walk there till ten o'clock in the morning."

Here, book in hand, and in dressing-gown and slippers, he would spend those two hours after sun-rise which Anglo-Indian gentlemen devote to riding, and Anglo-Indian ladies to sleeping off the arrears of the sultry night. Regularly, every morning, his studies were broken in upon by the arrival of his baby niece, who came to feed the crows with the toast which accompanied his early cup of tea; a ceremony during which he had much ado to protect the child from the advances of a multitude of birds, each almost as big as herself, which hopped and fluttered round her as she stood on the steps of the verandah. When the sun drove him indoors, (which happened sooner than he had promised himself, before he had learned by experience what the hot season was,) he went to his bath and toilette, and then to breakfast; "at which we support nature under the exhausting effects of the climate by means of plenty of eggs, mango-fish, snipe-pies, and frequently a hot beefsteak. My cook is renowned through Calcutta for his skill. He brought me attestations of a long succession of gourmands, and among them one from Lord Dalhousie, who pronounced him decidedly the first artist in Bengal. [Lord Dalhousie, the father of the Governor-General, was Commander-In-Chief in India during the years 1830 and 1831.] This great man, and his two assistants, I am to have for thirty rupees a month. While I am on the subject of the cuisine, I may as well say all that I have to say about it at once. The tropical fruits are wretched. The best of them is inferior to our apricot or gooseberry. When I was a child, I had a notion of its being the most exquisite of treats to eat plantains and yams, and to drink palm-wine. How I envied my father for having enjoyed these luxuries! I have now enjoyed them all, and I have found like much greater men on much more important occasions, that all is vanity. A plantain is very like a rotten pear,--so like that I would lay twenty to one that a person blindfolded would not discover the difference. A yam is better. It is like an indifferent potato. I tried palm-wine at a pretty village near Madras, where I slept one night. I told Captain Barron that I had been curious to taste that liquor ever since I first saw, eight or nine and twenty years ago, the picture of the negro climbing the tree in Sierra Leone. The next morning I was roused by a servant, with a large bowl of juice fresh from the tree. I drank it, and found it very like ginger-beer in which the ginger has been sparingly used."

Macaulay necessarily spent away from home the days on which the Supreme Council, or the Law Commission, held their meetings; but the rest of his work, legal, literary, and educational, he carried on in the quiet of his library. Now and again, a morning was consumed in returning calls, an expenditure of time which it is needless to say that he sorely grudged. "Happily, the good people here are too busy to be at home. Except the parsons, they are all usefully occupied somewhere or other, so that I have only to leave cards; but the reverend gentlemen are always within doors in the heat of the day, lying on their backs, regretting breakfast, longing for tiffin, and crying out for lemonade." After lunch he sate with Mrs. Trevelyan, translating Greek or reading French for her benefit; and Scribe's comedies and Saint Simon's Memoirs beguiled the long languid leisure of the Calcutta afternoon, while the punkah swung overhead, and the air came heavy and scented through the moistened grass-matting which shrouded the windows. At the approach of sunset, with its attendant breeze, he joined his sister in her drive along the banks of the Hooghly; and they returned by starlight,--too often to take part in a vast banquet of forty guests, dressed as fashionably as people can dress at ninety degrees East from Paris; who, one and all, had far rather have been eating their curry, and drinking their bitter beer, at home, in all the comfort of muslin and nankeen. Macaulay is vehement in his dislike of "those great formal dinners, which unite all the stiffness of a levee to all the disorder and discomfort of a two-shilling ordinary. Nothing can be duller. Nobody speaks except to the person next him. The conversation is the most deplorable twaddle, and, as I always sit next to the lady of the highest rank, or, in other words, to the oldest, ugliest, and proudest woman in the company, I am worse off than my neighbours."

Nevertheless he was far too acute a judge of men to undervalue the special type of mind which is produced and fostered by the influences of an Indian career. He was always ready to admit that there is no better company in the world than a young and rising civilian; no one who has more to say that is worth hearing, and who can say it in a manner better adapted to interest those who know good talk from bad. He delighted in that freedom from pedantry, affectation, and pretension which is one of the most agreeable characteristics of a service, to belong to which is in itself so effectual an education, that a bore is a phenomenon notorious everywhere within a hundred miles of the station which has the honour to possess him, and a fool is quoted by name throughout all the three Presidencies. Macaulay writes to his sisters at home: "The best way of seeing society here is to have very small parties. There is a little circle of people whose friendship I value, and in whose conversation I take pleasure: the Chief Justice, Sir Edward Ryan; my old friend, Malkin; Cameron and Macleod, the Law Commissioners; Macnaghten, among the older servants of the Company, and Mangles, Colvin, and John Peter Grant among the younger. [It cannot be said that all the claims made upon Macaulay's friendship were acknowledged as readily as those of Sir Benjamin Malkin. "I am dunned unmercifully by place-hunters. The oddest application that I have received is from that rascal --, who is somewhere in the interior. He tells me he is sure that prosperity has not changed me; that I am still the same John Macaulay who was his dearest friend, his more than brother; and that he means to come up, and live with me at Calcutta. If he fulfils his intention, I will have him taken before the police-magistrates."] These, in my opinion, are the flower of Calcutta society, and I often ask some of them to a quiet dinner." On the Friday of every week, these chosen few met round Macaulay's breakfast table to discuss the progress which the Law Commission had made in its labours; and each successive point which was started opened the way to such a flood of talk,--legal, historical, political, and personal,--that the company would sit far on towards noon over the empty teacups, until an uneasy sense of accumulating despatch-boxes drove them, one by one, to their respective offices.

There are scattered passages in these letters which prove that Macaulay's feelings, during his protracted absence from his native country, were at times almost as keen as those which racked the breast of Cicero, when he was forced to exchange the triumphs of the Forum, and the cozy suppers with his brother augurs, for his hateful place of banishment at Thessalonica, or his hardly less hateful seat of government at Tarsus. The complaints of the English statesman do not, however, amount in volume to a fiftieth part of those reiterated out pourings of lachrymose eloquence with which the Roman philosopher bewailed an expatriation that was hardly one-third as long. "I have no words," writes Macaulay, very much under-estimating the wealth of his own vocabulary, "to tell you how I pine for England, or how intensely bitter exile has been to me, though I hope that I have borne it well. I feel as if I had no other wish than to see my country again and die. Let me assure you that banishment is no light matter. No person can judge of it who has not experienced it. A complete revolution in all the habits of life; an estrangement from almost every old friend and acquaintance; fifteen thousand miles of ocean between the exile and everything that he cares for; all this is, to me at least, very trying. There is no temptation of wealth, or power, which would induce me to go through it again. But many people do not feel as I do. Indeed, the servants of the Company rarely have such a feeling; and it is natural that they should not have it, for they are sent out while still schoolboys, and when they know little of the world. The moment of emigration is to them also the moment of emancipation; and the pleasures of liberty and affluence to a great degree compensate them for the loss of their home. In a few years they become orientalised, and, by the time that they are of my age, they would generally prefer India, as a residence, to England. But it is a very different matter when a man is transplanted at thirty-three."

Making, as always, the best of everything, he was quite ready to allow that he might have been placed in a still less agreeable situation. In the following extract from a letter to his friend, Mrs. Drummond, there is much which will come home to those who are old enough to remember how vastly the Dublin of 1837 differed, for the worse, from the Dublin of 1875, "It now seems likely that you may remain in Ireland for years. I cannot conceive what has induced you to submit to such an exile. I declare, for my own part, that, little as I love Calcutta, I would rather stay here than be settled in the Phoenix Park. The last residence which I would choose would be a place with all the plagues, and none of the attractions, of a capital; a provincial city on fire with factions political and religious, peopled by raving Orangemen and raving Repealers, and distracted by a contest between Protestantism as fanatical as that of Knot and Catholicism as fanatical as that of Bonner. We have our share of the miseries of life in this country. We are annually baked four months, boiled four more, and allowed the remaining four to become cool if we can. At this moment, the sun is blazing like a furnace. The earth, soaked with oceans of rain, is steaming like a wet blanket. Vegetation is rotting all round us. Insects and undertakers are the only living creatures which seem to enjoy the climate. But, though our atmosphere is hot, our factions are lukewarm. A bad epigram in a newspaper, or a public meeting attended by a tailor, a pastry-cook, a reporter, two or three barristers, and eight or ten attorneys, are our most formidable annoyances. We have agitators in our own small way, Tritons of the minnows, bearing the same sort of resemblance to O'Connell that a lizard bears to an alligator. Therefore Calcutta for me, in preference to Dublin."

He had good reason for being grateful to Calcutta, and still better for not showing his gratitude by prolonging his stay there over a fourth summer and autumn. "That tremendous crash of the great commercial houses which took place a few years ago has produced a revolution in fashions. It ruined one half of the English society in Bengal, and seriously injured the other half. A large proportion of the most important functionaries here are deeply in debt, and accordingly, the mode of living is now exceedingly quiet and modest. Those immense subscriptions, those public tables, those costly equipages and entertainments of which Heber, and others who saw Calcutta a few years back, say so much, are never heard of. Speaking for myself, it was a great piece of good fortune that I came hither just at the time when the general distress had forced everybody to adopt a moderate way of living. Owing very much to that circumstance, (while keeping house, I think, more handsomely than any other member of Council,) I have saved what will enable me to do my part towards making my family comfortable; and I shall have a competency for myself, small indeed, but quite sufficient to render me as perfectly independent as if I were the possessor of Burleigh or Chatsworth." [Macaulay writes to Lord Mahon on the last day of December 1836: "In another year I hope to leave this country, with a fortune which you would think ridiculously small, but which will make me as independent as if I had all that Lord Westminster has above the ground, and Lord Durham below it. I have no intention of again taking part in politics; but I cannot tell what effect the sight of the old Hall and Abbey may produce on me."]

"The rainy season of 1837 has been exceedingly unhealthy. Our house has escaped as well as any; yet Hannah is the only one of us who has come off untouched. The baby has been repeatedly unwell. Trevelyan has suffered a good deal, and is kept right only by occasional trips in a steamer down to the mouth of the Hooghly. I had a smart touch of fever, which happily stayed but an hour or two, and I took such vigorous measures that it never came again; but I remained unnerved and exhausted for nearly a fortnight. This was my first, and I hope my last, taste of Indian maladies. It is a happy thing for us all that we are not to pass another year in the reek of this deadly marsh." Macaulay wisely declined to set the hope of making another lac of rupees against the risk, to himself and others of such a fate as subsequently befell Lord Canning and Mr. James Wilson. He put the finishing stroke to his various labours; resigned his seat in the Council, and his Presidentships of the Law Commission and the Committee of Public Instruction; and, in company with the Trevelyans, sailed for England in the first fortnight of the year 1838.

To Mr Thomas Flower Ellis.

Calcutta: December 16, 1834.

Dear Ellis,--Many thanks for your letter. It is delightful in this strange land to see the handwriting of such a friend. We must keep up our spirits. We shall meet, I trust, in little more than four years, with feelings of regard only strengthened by our separation. My spirits are not bad; and they ought not to be bad. I have health; affluence; consideration; great power to do good; functions which, while they are honourable and useful, are not painfully burdensome; leisure for study; good books; an unclouded and active mind; warm affections; and a very dear sister. There will soon be a change in my domestic arrangements. My sister is to be married next week. Her lover, who is lover enough to be a knight of the Round Table, is one of the most distinguished of our young Civilians.

I have the very highest opinion of his talents both for action and for discussion. Indeed, I should call him a man of real genius. He is also, what is even more important, a man of the utmost purity of honour, of a sweet temper, and of strong principle. His public virtue has gone through very severe trials, and has come out resplendent. Lord William, in congratulating me the other day, said that he thought my destined brother-in-law the ablest young man in the service. His name is Trevelyan. He is a nephew of Sir John Trevelyan, a baronet; in Cornwall I suppose, by the name; for I never took the trouble to ask.

He and my sister will live with me during my stay here. I have a house about as large as Lord Dudley's in Park Lane, or rather larger, so that I shall accommodate them without the smallest difficulty. This arrangement is acceptable to me, because it saves me from the misery of parting with my sister in this strange land; and is, I believe, equally gratifying to Trevelyan, whose education, like that of other Indian servants, was huddled up hastily at home; who has an insatiable thirst for knowledge of every sort; and who looks on me as little less than an oracle of wisdom. He came to me the other morning to know whether I would advise him to keep up his Greek, which he feared he had nearly lost. I gave him Homer, and asked him to read a page; and I found that, like most boys of any talent who had been at the Charterhouse, he was very well grounded in that language. He read with perfect rapture, and has marched off with the book, declaring that he shall never be content till he has finished the whole. This, you will think, is not a bad brother-in-law for a man to pick up in 22 degrees of North latitude, and 100 degrees of East longitude.

I read much, and particularly Greek; and I find that I am, in all essentials, still not a bad scholar. I could, I think, with a year's hard study, qualify myself to fight a good battle for a Craven's scholarship. I read, however, not as I read at College, but like a man of the world. If I do not know a word, I pass it by unless it is important to the sense. If I find, as I have of late often found, a passage which refuses to give up its meaning at the second reading, I let it alone. I have read during the last fortnight, before breakfast, three books of Herodotus, and four plays of Aeschylus. My admiration of Aeschylus has been prodigiously increased by this reperusal. I cannot conceive how any person of the smallest pretension to taste should doubt about his immeasurable superiority to every poet of antiquity, Homer only excepted. Even Milton, I think, must yield to him. It is quite unintelligible to me that the ancient critics should have placed him so low. Horace's notice of him in the Ars Poetica is quite ridiculous. There is, to be sure, the "magnum loqui;" but the great topic insisted on is the skill of Aeschylus as a manager, as a property-man; the judicious way in which he boarded the stage; the masks, the buskins, and the dresses.

["Post hunc personae pallaeque repertor honestae
Aeschylus et modicis instravit pulpita tignis,
Et docuit magnumnque loqui, nitique cothuruo."]

And, after all, the "magnum loqui," though the most obvious characteristic of Aeschylus, is by no means his highest or his best. Nor can I explain this by saying that Horace had too tame and unimaginative a mind to appreciate Aeschylus. Horace knew what he could himself do, and, with admirable wisdom, he confined himself to that; but he seems to have had a perfectly clear comprehension of the merit of those great masters whom he never attempted to rival. He praised Pindar most enthusiastically. It seems incomprehensible to me that a critic, who admired Pindar, should not admire Aeschylus far more.

Greek reminds me of Cambridge and of Thirlwall. When you see Thirlwall, tell him that I congratulate him from the bottom of my soul on having suffered in so good a cause; and that I would rather have been treated as he has been treated, on such an account, than have the Mastership of Trinity. [The subjoined extract from the letter of a leading member of Trinity College explains Macaulay's indignation. "Thirlwall published a pamphlet in 1834, on the admission of Dissenters to the University. The result was that he was either deprived of his Assistant Tutorship or had to give it up. Thirlwall left Cambridge soon afterwards. I suppose that, if he had remained, he would have been very possibly Wordsworth's successor in the Mastership."] There would be some chance for the Church, if we had more Churchmen of the same breed, worthy successors of Leighton and Tillotson.

From one Trinity Fellow I pass to another. (This letter is quite a study to a metaphysician who wishes to illustrate the Law of Association.) We have no official tidings yet of Malkin's appointment to the vacant seat on the Bench at Calcutta. I cannot tell you how delighted I am at the prospect of having him here. An honest enlightened Judge, without professional narrowness, is the very man whom we want on public grounds. And, as to my private feelings, nothing could be more agreeable to me than to have an old friend, and so estimable a friend, brought so near to me in this distant country.

Ever, dear Ellis,

Yours very affectionately

T. B. MACAULAY.

Calcutta: February 8, 1835.

Dear Ellis,--The last month has been the most painful that I ever went through. Indeed, I never knew before what it was to be miserable. Early in January, letters from England brought me news of the death of my youngest sister. What she was to me no words can express. I will not say that she was dearer to me than anything in the world; for my sister who was with me was equally dear; but she was as dear to me as one human being can be to another. Even now, when time has begun to do its healing office, I cannot write about her without being altogether unmanned. That I have not utterly sunk under this blow I owe chiefly to literature. What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;--to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal! Many times during the last few weeks I have repeated to myself those fine lines of old Hesiod:

ei gar tis kai penthos egon neokedei thumo aksetai kradien akakhemenos, autar aoidos mousaon therapon kleia proteron anthropon umnese, makaras te theous oi Olumpon ekhousi, aips oge dusphroneon epilethetai oude ti kedeon memnetai takheos de paretrape dora theaon.

["For if to one whose grief is fresh as he sits silent with sorrow-stricken heart, a minstrel, the henchman of the Muses, celebrates the men of old and the gods who possess Olympus; straightway he forgets his melancholy, and remembers not at all his grief, beguiled by the blessed gift of the goddesses of song." In Macaulay's Hesiod this passage is scored with three lines in pencil.]

I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing to myself. I have never felt anything like it. I was enraptured with Italian during the six months which I gave up to it; and I was little less pleased with Spanish. But, when I went back to the Greek, I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. Oh that wonderful people! There is not one art, not one science, about which we may not use the same expression which Lucretius has employed about the victory over superstition, "Primum Graius homo--."

I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these great masters while still in the full vigour of life, and when my taste and judgment are mature. Most people read all the Greek that they ever read before they are five and twenty. They never find time for such studies afterwards till they are in the decline of life; and then their knowledge of the language is in a great measure lost, and cannot easily be recovered. Accordingly, almost all the ideas that people have of Greek literature, are ideas formed while they were still very young. A young man, whatever his genius may be, is no judge of such a writer as Thucydides. I had no high opinion of him ten years ago. I have now been reading him with a mind accustomed to historical researches, and to political affairs; and I am astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness. I could not bear Euripides at college. I now read my recantation. He has faults undoubtedly. But what a poet! The Medea, the Alcestis, the Troades, the Bacchae, are alone sufficient to place him in the very first rank. Instead of depreciating him, as I have done, I may, for aught I know, end by editing him.

I have read Pindar,--with less pleasure than I feel in reading the great Attic poets, but still with admiration. An idea occurred to me which may very likely have been noticed by a hundred people before. I was always puzzled to understand the reason for the extremely abrupt transitions in those Odes of Horace which are meant to be particularly fine. The "justum et tenacem" is an instance. All at once you find yourself in heaven, Heaven knows how. What the firmness of just men in times of tyranny, or of tumult, has to do with Juno's oration about Troy it is hardly possible to conceive. Then, again, how strangely the fight between the Gods and the Giants is tacked on to the fine hymn to the Muses in that noble ode, "Descende coelo et die age tibia"! This always struck me as a great fault, and an inexplicable one; for it is peculiarly alien from the calm good sense, and good taste, which distinguish Horace.

My explanation of it is this. The Odes of Pindar were the acknowledged models of lyric poetry. Lyric poets imitated his manner as closely as they could; and nothing was more remarkable in his compositions than the extreme violence and abruptness of the transitions. This in Pindar was quite natural and defensible. He had to write an immense number of poems on subjects extremely barren, and extremely monotonous. There could be little difference between one boxing-match and another. Accordingly, he made all possible haste to escape from the immediate subject, and to bring in, by hook or by crook, some local description; some old legend; something or other, in short, which might be more susceptible of poetical embellishment, and less utterly threadbare, than the circumstances of a race or a wrestling-match. This was not the practice of Pindar alone. There is an old story which proves that Simonides did the same, and that sometimes the hero of the day was nettled at finding how little was said about him in the Ode for which he was to pay. This abruptness of transition was, therefore, in the Greek lyric poets, a fault rendered inevitable by the peculiarly barren and uniform nature of the subjects which they had to treat. But, like many other faults of great masters, it appeared to their imitators a beauty; and a beauty almost essential to the grander Ode. Horace was perfectly at liberty to choose his own subjects, and to treat them after his own fashion. But he confounded what was merely accidental in Pindar's manner with what was essential; and because Pindar, when he had to celebrate a foolish lad from Aegina who had tripped up another's heels at the Isthmus, made all possible haste to get away from so paltry a topic to the ancient heroes of the race of Aeacus, Horace took it into his head that he ought always to begin as far from the subject as possible, and then arrive at it by some strange and sudden bound. This is my solution. At least I can find no better. The most obscure passage,--at least the strangest passage,--in all Horace may be explained by supposing that he was misled by Pindar's example: I mean that odd parenthesis in the "Qualem Ministrum:"

quibus
Mos unde deductus per omne--.

This passage, taken by itself, always struck me as the harshest, queerest, and most preposterous digression in the world. But there are several things in Pindar very like it. [Orelli makes an observation, much to the same effect, in his note on this passage in his edition of 1850.]

You must excuse all this, for I labour at present under a suppression of Greek, and am likely to do so for at least three years to come. Malkin may be some relief; but I am quite unable to guess whether he means to come to Calcutta. I am in excellent bodily health, and I am recovering my mental health; but I have been sorely tried. Money matters look well. My new brother-in-law and I are brothers in more than law. I am more comfortable than I expected to be in this country; and, as to the climate, I think it, beyond all comparison, better than that of the House of Commons.

Yours affectionately

T. B. MACAULAY.

Writing three days after the date of the foregoing letter, Macaulay says to his old friend Mr. Sharp: "You see that my mind is not in great danger of rusting. The danger is that I may become a mere pedant. I feel a habit of quotation growing on me; but I resist that devil, for such it is, and it flees from me. It is all that I can do to keep Greek and Latin out of all my letters. Wise sayings of Euripides are even now at my fingers' ends. If I did not maintain a constant struggle against this propensity, my correspondence would resemble the notes to the 'Pursuits of Literature.' It is a dangerous thing for a man with a very strong memory to read very much. I could give you three or four quotations this moment in support of that proposition; but I will bring the vicious propensity under subjection, if I can." [Many years later Macaulay wrote to my mother: "Dr. -- came, and I found him a very clever man; a little of a coxcomb, but, I dare say, not the worse physician for that. He must have quoted Horace and Virgil six times at least a propos of his medical inquiries. Horace says, in a poem in which he jeers the Stoics, that even a wise man is out of sort when 'pituita molesta est;' which is, being interpreted, 'when, his phlegm is troublesome.' The Doctor thought it necessary to quote this passage in order to prove that phlegm is troublesome;--a proposition, of the truth of which, I will venture to say, no man on earth is better convinced than myself."]

Calcutta, May 29, 1835.

Dear Ellis,--I am in great want of news. We know that the Tories dissolved at the end of December, and we also know that they were beaten towards the end of February. [In November 1834 the King called Sir Robert Peel to power; after having of his own accord dismissed the Whig Ministry. Parliament was dissolved, but the Tories did not succeed in obtaining a majority. After three months of constant and angry fighting, Peel was driven from office in April 1835.] As to what passed in the interval, we are quite in the dark. I will not plague you with comments on events which will have been driven out of your mind by other events before this reaches you, or with prophecies which may be falsified before you receive them. About the final issue I am certain. The language of the first great reformer is that which I should use in reply to the exultation of our Tories here, if there were any of them who could understand it

sebou, proseukhou thopte ton kratount aei emoi d'elasson Zeuos e meden melei. drato krateito tonde ton brakhun khronon opes thelei daron gar ouk arksei theois

["Worship thou, adore, and flatter the monarch of the hour. To me Jove is of less account than nothing. Let him have his will, and his sceptre, for this brief season; for he will not long be the ruler of the Gods." It is needless to say that poor William the Fourth was the Jove of the Whig Prometheus.]

As for myself, I rejoice that I am out of the present storm. "Suave mari magno;" or, as your new Premier, if he be still Premier, construes. "It is a source of melancholy satisfaction." I may, indeed, feel the effects of the changes here, but more on public than private grounds. A Tory Governor-General is not very likely to agree with me about the very important law reforms which I am about to bring before the Council. But he is not likely to treat me ill personally; or, if he does,

all ou ti khairon, en tod orthothe Belos,

["It shall be to his cost, so long as this bow carries true."]

as Philoctetes says. In a few months I shall have enough to enable me to live, after my very moderate fashion, in perfect independence at home; and whatever debts any Governor-General may choose to lay on me at Calcutta shall be paid off, he may rely on it, with compound interest, at Westminster.

My time is divided between public business and books. I mix with society as little as I can. My spirits have not yet recovered,--I sometimes think that they will never wholly recover,--the shock which they received five months ago. I find that nothing soothes them so much as the contemplation of those miracles of art which Athens has bequeathed to us. I am really becoming, I hope not a pedant, but certainly an enthusiast about classical literature. I have just finished a second reading of Sophocles. I am now deep in Plato, and intend to go right through all his works. His genius is above praise. Even where he is most absurd,--as, for example, in the Cratylus,--he shows an acuteness, and an expanse of intellect, which is quite a phenomenon by itself. The character of Socrates does not rise upon me. The more I read about him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him. If he had treated me as he is said to have treated Protagoras, Hippias, and Gorgias, I could never have forgiven him.

Nothing has struck me so much in Plato's dialogues as the raillery. At college, somehow or other, I did not understand or appreciate it. I cannot describe to you the way in which it now tickles me. I often sink forward on my huge old Marsilius Ficinus in a fit of laughter. I should say that there never was a vein of ridicule so rich, at the same time so delicate. It is superior to Voltaire's; nay, to Pascal's. Perhaps there are one or two passages in Cervantes, and one or two in Fielding, that might give a modern reader a notion of it.