I am leading my watering-place life here; reading, writing, and walking all day; speaking to nobody but the waiter and the chambermaid; solitary in a great crowd, and content with solitude.  I shall be in London again on Thursday, and shall also be an M. P. From that day you may send your letters as freely as ever; and pray do not be sparing of them.  Do you read any novels at Liverpool?  I should fear that the good Quakers would twitch them out of your hands, and appoint their portion in the fire.  Yet probably you have some safe place, some box, some drawer with a key, wherein a marble-covered book may lie for Nancy’s Sunday reading.  And, if you do not read novels, what do you read?  How does Schiller go on?  I have sadly neglected Calderon; but, whenever I have a month to spare, I shall carry my conquests far and deep into Spanish literature.

Ever yours

T. B. M.

To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay.

London:  July 2, 1832.

My dear Sisters,—­I am, I think, a better correspondent than you two put together.  I will venture to say that I have written more letters, by a good many, than I have received, and this with India and the Edinburgh Review on my hands; the Life of Mirabeau to be criticised; the Rajah of Travancore to be kept in order; and the bad money, which the Emperor of the Burmese has had the impudence to send us byway of tribute, to be exchanged for better.  You have nothing to do but to be good, and write.  Make no excuses, for your excuses are contradictory.  If you see sights, describe them; for then you have subjects.  If you stay at home, write; for then you have time.  Remember that I never saw the cemetery or the railroad.  Be particular, above all, in your accounts of the Quakers.  I enjoin this especially on Nancy; for from Meg I have no hope of extracting a word of truth.

I dined yesterday at Holland House; all Lords except myself.  Lord Radnor, Lord Poltimore, Lord King, Lord Russell, and his uncle Lord John.  Lady Holland was very gracious, praised my article on Burleigh to the skies, and told me, among other things, that she had talked on the preceding day for two hours with Charles Grant upon religion, and had found him very liberal and tolerant.  It was, I suppose, the cholera which sent her Ladyship to the only saint in the Ministry for ghostly counsel.  Poor Macdonald’s case was most undoubtedly cholera.  It is said that Lord Amesbury also died of cholera, though no very strange explanation seems necessary to account for the death of a man of eighty-four.  Yesterday it was rumoured that the three Miss Molyneuxes, of whom by the way there are only two, were all dead in the same way; that the Bishop of Worcester and Lord Barham were no more; and many other foolish stories.  I do not believe there is the slightest ground for uneasiness; though Lady Holland apparently considers the case so serious that she has taken her conscience out of Allen’s keeping, and put it into the hands of Charles Grant.