poor wretch in my arms; for, like most of his countrymen, he is a chickenhearted fellow, and was almost fainting away.  My honest barber, a fine old soldier in the Company’s service, ran off for assistance, and soon returned with some police officers.  I ordered the bearers to turn round, and proceeded instantly to the house of the Commandant.  I was not long detained here.  Nothing can be well imagined more expeditious than the administration of justice in this country, when the judge is a Colonel, and the plaintiff a Councillor.  I told my story in three words.  In three minutes the rioters were marched off to prison, and my servant, with a sepoy to guard him, was fairly on his road and out of danger.”

Early next morning Macaulay began to descend the pass.

“After going down for about an hour we emerged from the clouds and moisture, and the plain of Mysore lay before us—­a vast ocean of foliage on which the sun was shining gloriously.  I am very little given to cant about the beauties of nature, but I was moved almost to tears.  I jumped off the palanquin, and walked in front of it down the immense declivity.  In two hours we descended about three thousand feet.  Every turning in the road showed the boundless forest below in some new point of view.  I was greatly struck with the resemblance which this prodigious jungle, as old as the world and planted by nature, bears to the fine works of the great English landscape gardeners.  It was exactly a Wentworth Park, as large as Devonshire.  After reaching the foot of the hills, we travelled through a succession of scenes which might have been part of the garden of Eden.  Such gigantic trees I never saw.  In a quarter of an hour I passed hundreds the smallest of which would bear a comparison with any of those oaks which are shown as prodigious in England.  The grass, the weeds, and the wild flowers grew as high as my head.  The sun, almost a stranger to me, was now shining brightly; and, when late in the afternoon I again got out of my palanquin and looked back, I saw the large mountain ridge from which I had descended twenty miles behind me, still buried in the same mass of fog and rain in which I had been living for weeks.

“On Tuesday, the 16th” (of September), “I went on board at Madras.  I amused myself on the voyage to Calcutta with learning Portuguese, and made myself almost as well acquainted with it as I care to be.  I read the Lusiad, and am now reading it a second time.  I own that I am disappointed in Camoens; but I have so often found my first impressions wrong on such subjects that I still hope to be able to join my voice to that of the great body of critics.  I never read any famous foreign book, which did not, in the first perusal, fall short of my expectations; except Dante’s poem, and Don Quixote, which were prodigiously superior to what I had imagined.  Yet in these cases I had not pitched my expectations low.”