My power of finding amusement without companions was pretty well tried on my voyage.  I read insatiably; the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil, Horace, Caesar’s Commentaries, Bacon de Augmentis, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon’s Rome, Mill’s India, all the seventy volumes of Voltaire, Sismondi’s History of France, and the seven thick folios of the Biographia Britannica.  I found my Greek and Latin in good condition enough.  I liked the Iliad a little less, and the Odyssey a great deal more than formerly.  Horace charmed me more than ever; Virgil not quite so much as he used to do.  The want of human character, the poverty of his supernatural machinery, struck me very strongly.  Can anything be so bad as the living bush which bleeds and talks, or the Harpies who befoul Aeneas’s dinner?  It is as extravagant as Ariosto, and as dull as Wilkie’s Epigoniad.  The last six books, which Virgil had not fully corrected, pleased me better than the first six.  I like him best on Italian ground.  I like his localities; his national enthusiasm; his frequent allusions to his country, its history, its antiquities, and its greatness.  In this respect he often reminded me of Sir Walter Scott, with whom, in the general character of his mind, he had very little affinity.  The Georgics pleased me better; the Eclogues best,—­the second and tenth above all.  But I think the finest lines in the Latin language are those five which begin,

“Sepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala—­”

[Eclogue viii. 37.]

I cannot tell you how they struck me.  I was amused to find that
Voltaire pronounces that passage to be the finest in Virgil.

I liked the Jerusalem better than I used to do.  I was enraptured with Ariosto; and I still think of Dante, as I thought when I first read him, that he is a superior poet to Milton, that he runs neck and neck with Homer, and that none but Shakespeare has gone decidedly beyond him.

As soon as I reach Calcutta I intend to read Herodotus again.  By the bye, why do not you translate him?  You would do it excellently; and a translation of Herodotus, well executed, would rank with original compositions.  A quarter of an hour a day would finish the work in five years.  The notes might be made the most amusing in the world.  I wish you would think of it.  At all events, I hope you will do something which may interest more than seven or eight people.  Your talents are too great, and your leisure time too small, to be wasted in inquiries so frivolous, (I must call them,) as those in which you have of late been too much engaged; whether the Cherokees are of the same race with the Chickasaws; whether Van Diemen’s Land was peopled from New Holland, or New Holland from Van Diemen’s land; what is the precise anode of appointing a headman in a village in Timbuctoo.  I would not give the worst page in Clarendon or Fra Paolo for all that ever was, or ever will be, written about the migrations of the Leleges and the laws of the Oscans.