Ever yours

T. B. M.

To Hannah M. Macaulay.

Weston House:  September 29, 1832.

My dear Sister,—­I came hither yesterday, and found a handsome house, pretty grounds, and a very kind host and hostess.  The house is really very well planned.  I do not know that I have ever seen so happy an imitation of the domestic architecture of Elizabeth’s reign.  The oriels, towers, terraces, and battlements are in the most perfect keeping; and the building is as convenient within as it is picturesque without.  A few weather-stains, or a few American creepers, and a little ivy, would make it perfect; and all that will come, I suppose, with time.  The terrace is my favourite spot.  I always liked “the trim gardens” of which Milton speaks, and thought that Brown and his imitators went too far in bringing forests and sheep-walks up to the very windows of drawing-rooms.

I came through Oxford.  It was as beautiful a day as the second day of our visit, and the High Street was in all its glory.  But it made me quite sad to find myself there without you and Margaret.  All my old Oxford associations are gone.  Oxford, instead of being, as it used to be, the magnificent old city of the seventeenth century,—­still preserving its antique character among the improvements of modern times, and exhibiting in the midst of upstart Birminghams and Manchesters the same aspect which it wore when Charles held his court at Christchurch, and Rupert led his cavalry over Magdalene Bridge, is now to me only the place where I was so happy with my little sisters.  But I was restored to mirth, and even to indecorous mirth, by what happened after we had left the fine old place behind us.  There was a young fellow of about five-and-twenty, mustachioed and smartly dressed, in the coach with me.  He was not absolutely uneducated; for he was reading a novel, the Hungarian brothers, the whole way.  We rode, as I told you, through the High Street.  The coach stopped to dine; and this youth passed half an hour in the midst of that city of palaces.  He looked about him with his mouth open, as he re-entered the coach, and all the while that we were driving away past the Ratcliffe Library, the Great Court of All Souls, Exeter, Lincoln, Trinity, Balliol, and St. John’s.  When we were about a mile on the road he spoke the first words that I had heard him utter.  “That was a pretty town enough.  Pray, sir, what is it called?” I could not answer him for laughing; but he seemed quite unconscious of his own absurdity.

Ever yours

T. B. M.

During all the period covered by this correspondence the town of Leeds was alive with the agitation of a turbulent, but not very dubious, contest.  Macaulay’s relations with the electors whose votes he was courting are too characteristic to be omitted altogether from the story of his life; though the style of his speeches and manifestoes is more likely to excite the admiring envy of modern members of Parliament, than to be taken