As you like my verses, I will some day or other write you a whole rhyming letter.  I wonder whether any man ever wrote doggrel so easily.  I run it off just as fast as my pen can move, and that is faster by about three words in a minute than any other pen that I know.  This comes of a schoolboy habit of writing verses all day long.  Shall I tell you the news in rhyme?  I think I will send you a regular sing-song gazette.

 We gained a victory last night as great as e’er was known. 
 We beat the Opposition upon the Russian loan. 
 They hoped for a majority, and also for our places. 
 We won the day by seventy-nine.  You should have seen their faces. 
 Old Croker, when the shout went down our rank, looked blue with rage. 
 You’d have said he had the cholera in the spasmodic stage. 
 Dawson was red with ire as if his face was smeared with berries;
 But of all human visages the worst was that of Herries. 
 Though not his friend, my tender heart I own could not but feel
 A little for the misery of poor Sir Robert Peel. 
 But hang the dirty Tories! and let them starve and pine! 
 Huzza for the majority of glorious seventy-nine!

Ever yours

T. B. M.

To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay.

House of Commons Smoking-Room

July 23, 1832.

My dear Sisters,—­I am writing here, at eleven at night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres, and in the vilest of all vile company; with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils, and the ugly, hypocritical face of Lieutenant—­ before my eyes.  There he sits writing opposite to me.  To whom, for a ducat?  To some secretary of an Hibernian Bible Society; or to some old woman who gives cheap tracts, instead of blankets, to the starving peasantry of Connemara; or to some good Protestant Lord who bullies his Popish tenants.  Reject not my letter, though it is redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail; for this is the room—­

The room,—­but I think I’ll describe it in rhyme,
That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime. 
The smell of tobacco was always the same;
But the chloride was brought since the cholera came.

But I must return to prose, and tell you all that has fallen out since I wrote last.  I have been dining with the Listers at Knightsbridge.  They are in a very nice house, next, or almost next, to that which the Wilberforces had.  We had quite a family party.  There were George Villiers, and Hyde Villiers, and Edward Villiers.  Charles was not there.  George and Hyde rank very high in my opinion.  I liked their behaviour to their sister much.  She seems to be the pet of the whole family; and it is natural that she should be so.  Their manners are softened by her presence; and any roughness and sharpness which they have in intercourse with men vanishes at once.  They seem to love the very ground that she treads on; and she is undoubtedly a charming woman, pretty, clever, lively, and polite.