I said nothing about Lord Byron’s criticism on Walpole, because I thought it, like most of his Lordship’s criticism, below refutation.  On the drama Lord Byron wrote more nonsense than on any subject.  He wanted to have restored the unities.  His practice proved as unsuccessful as his theory was absurd.  His admiration of the “Mysterious Mother” was of a piece with his thinking Gifford, and Rogers, greater poets than Wordsworth, and Coleridge.

Ever yours truly

T. B. MACAULAY.

London:  October 28, 1833.

Dear Hannah,—­I wish to have Malkin as head of the Commission at Canton, and Grant seems now to be strongly bent on the same plan. [Sir Benjamin Malkin, a college friend of Macaulay, was afterwards a judge in the Supreme Court at Calcutta.] Malkin is a man of singular temper, judgment, and firmness of nerve.  Danger and responsibility, instead of agitating and confusing him, always bring out whatever there is in him.  This was the reason of his great success at Cambridge.  He made a figure there far beyond his learning or his talents, though both his learning and his talents are highly respectable.  But the moment that he sate down to be examined, which is just the situation in which all other people, from natural flurry, do worse than at other times, be began to do his very best.  His intellect became clearer, and his manner more quiet, than usual.  He is the very man to make up his mind in three minutes if the Viceroy of Canton were in a rage, the mob bellowing round the doors of the factory, and an English ship of war making preparations to bombard the town.

A propos of places, my father has been at me again about P—.  Would you think it?  This lad has a hundred and twenty pounds a year for life!  I could not believe my ears; but so it is; and I, who have not a penny, with half a dozen brothers and sisters as poor as myself, am to move heaven and earth to push this boy who, as he is the silliest, is also, I think, the richest relation that I have in the world.

I am to dine on Thursday with the Fishmongers’ Company, the first company for gourmandise in the world.  Their magnificent Hall near London Bridge is not yet built, but, as respects eating and drinking, I shall be no loser; for we are to be entertained at the Albion Tavern.  This is the first dinner-party that I shall have been to for a long time.  There is nobody in town that I know except official men, and they have left their wives and households in the country.  I met Poodle Byng, it is true, the day before yesterday in the street; and he begged me to make haste to Brooks’s; for Lord Essex was there, he said, whipping up for a dinner-party; cursing and swearing at all his friends for being out of town; and wishing—­what an honour!—­that Macaulay was in London.  I preserved all the dignity of a young lady in an affaire du coeur.  “I shall not run after my Lord, I assure you.  If he wants me, he knows where he may hear of me.”  This nibble is the nearest approach to a dinner-party that I have had.