“I spoke to him once about Clarissa.  ‘Not read Clarissa!’ he cried out.  ’If you have once read Clarissa, and are infected by it, you can’t leave it.  When I was in India I passed one hot season in the Hills; and there were the Governor-General, and the Secretary of Government, and the Commander-in-Chief, and their wives.  I had Clarissa with me; and, as soon as they began to read, the whole station was in a passion of excitement about Miss Harlowe, and her misfortunes, and her scoundrelly Lovelace.  The Governor’s wife seized the book; the Secretary waited for it; the Chief justice could not read it for tears.’  He acted the whole scene; he paced up and down the Athenaeum library.  I dare say he could have spoken pages of the book; of that book, and of what countless piles of others!”

An old Scotch doctor, a Jacobin and a free-thinker, who could only be got to attend church by the positive orders of the Governor-General, cried over the last volume until he was too ill to appear at dinner. [Degenerate readers of our own day have actually been provided with an abridgment of Clarissa, itself as long as an ordinary novel.  A wiser course than buying the abridgment would be to commence the original at the Third volume.  In the same way, if anyone, after obtaining the outline of Lady Clementina’s story from a more adventurous friend, will read Sir Charles Grandison, skipping all letters from Italians, to Italians, and about Italians, he will find that he has got hold of a delightful, and not unmanageable, book.] The Chief Secretary,—­afterwards, as Sir William Macnaghten, the hero and the victim of the darkest episode in our Indian history,—­ declared that reading this copy of Clarissa, under the inspiration of its owner’s enthusiasm, was nothing less than an epoch in his life.  After the lapse of thirty years, when Ootacamund had long enjoyed the advantage of a book-club and a circulating library, the tradition of Macaulay and his novel still lingered on with a tenacity most unusual in the ever-shifting society of an Indian station.

“At length Lord William gave me leave of absence.  My bearers were posted along the road; my palanquins were packed; and I was to start next day; when an event took place which may give you some insight into the state of the laws, morals, and manners among the natives.

“My new servant, a Christian, but such a Christian as the missionaries make in this part of the world, had been persecuted most unmercifully for his religion by the servants of some other gentlemen on the Hills.  At last they contrived to excite against him (whether justly or unjustly I am quite unable to say) the jealousy of one of Lord William’s under-cooks.  We had accordingly a most glorious tragi-comedy; the part of Othello by the cook aforesaid; Desdemona by an ugly, impudent Pariah girl, his wife; Iago by Colonel Casement’s servant; and Michael Cassio by my rascal.  The place of the handkerchief was supplied by a small piece of sugar-candy which Desdemona was detected in the act of sucking, and which had found its way from my canisters to her fingers.  If I had any part in the piece, it was, I am afraid, that of Roderigo, whom Shakespeare describes as a ’foolish gentleman,’ and who also appears to have had ’money in his purse.’