How I run on in quotation!  But, when I begin to cite the verses of our great writers, I never can stop.  Stop I must, however.

Yours

T. B. M.

To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay.

London:  July 18, 1832.

My dear Sisters,—­I have heard from Napier.  He speaks rapturously of my article on Dumont, [Dumont’s “Life of Mirabeau.”  See the Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay.] but sends me no money.  Allah blacken his face! as the Persians say.  He has not yet paid me for Burleigh.

We are worked to death in the House of Commons, and we are henceforth to sit on Saturdays.  This, indeed, is the only way to get through our business.  On Saturday next we shall, I hope, rise before seven, as I am engaged to dine on that day with pretty, witty Mrs.—.  I fell in with her at Lady Grey’s great crush, and found her very agreeable.  Her husband is nothing in society.  Ropers has some very good stories about their domestic happiness,—­stories confirming a theory of mine which, as I remember, made you very angry.  When they first married, Mrs.—­ treated her husband with great respect.  But, when his novel came out and failed completely, she changed her conduct, and has, ever since that unfortunate publication, henpecked the poor author unmercifully.  And the case, says Ropers, is the harder, because it is suspected that she wrote part of the book herself.  It is like the scene in Milton where Eve, after tempting Adam, abuses him for yielding to temptation.  But do you not remember how I told you that much of the love of women depended on the eminence of men?  And do you not remember how, on behalf of your sex, you resented the imputation?

As to the present state of affairs, abroad and at home, I cannot sum it up better than in these beautiful lines of the poet: 

 Peel is preaching, and Croker is lying. 
 The cholera’s raging, the people are dying. 
 When the House is the coolest, as I am alive,
 The thermometer stands at a hundred and five. 
 We debate in a heat that seems likely to burn us,
 Much like the three children who sang in the furnace. 
 The disorders at Paris have not ceased to plague us;
 Don Pedro, I hope, is ere this on the Tagus;
 In Ireland no tithe can be raised by a parson;
 Mr. Smithers is just hanged for murder and arson;
 Dr. Thorpe has retired from the Lock, and ’tis said
 That poor little Wilks will succeed in his stead.

Ever yours

T. B. M.

To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay.

London:  July 21 1832.

My dear Sisters,—­I am glad to find that there is no chance of Nancy’s turning Quaker.  She would, indeed, make a queer kind of female Friend.

What the Yankees will say about me I neither know nor care.  I told them the dates of my birth, and of my coming into Parliament.  I told them also that I was educated at Cambridge.  As to my early bon-mots, my crying for holidays, my walks to school through showers of cats and dogs, I have left all those for the “Life of the late Right Honourable Thomas Babington Macaulay, with large extracts from his correspondence, in two volumes, by the Very Rev. J. Macaulay, Dean of Durham, and Rector of Bishopsgate, with a superb portrait from the picture by Pickersgill in the possession of the Marquis of Lansdowne.”