another man of twenty-seven who could have written it.  Trevelyan is a most stormy reformer.  Lord William said to me, before anyone had observed Trevelyan’s attentions to Nancy:  “That man is almost always on the right side in every question; and it is well that he is so, for he gives a most confounded deal of trouble when he happens to take the wrong one.” [Macaulay used to apply to his future brother-in-law the remark which Julius Caesar made with regard to his young friend Brutus:  “Magni refert hic quid velit; sed quidquid volet, valde volet.”] He is quite at the head of that active party among the younger servants of the Company who take the side of improvement.  In particular, he is the soul of every scheme for diffusing education among the natives of this country.  His reading has been very confined; but to the little that he has read he has brought a mind as active and restless as Lord Brougham’s, and much more judicious and honest.

As to his person, he always looks like a gentleman, particularly on horseback.  He is very active and athletic, and is renowned as a great master in the most exciting and perilous of field sports, the spearing of wild boars.  His face has a most characteristic expression of ardour and impetuosity, which makes his countenance very interesting to me.  Birth is a thing that I care nothing about; but his family is one of the oldest and best in England.

During the important years of his life, from twenty to twenty-five, or thereabouts, Trevelyan was in a remote province of India, where his whole time was divided between public business and field sports, and where he seldom saw a European gentleman and never a European lady.  He has no small talk.  His mind is full of schemes of moral and political improvement, and his zeal boils over in his talk.  His topics, even in courtship, are steam navigation, the education of the natives, the equalisation of the sugar duties, the substitution of the Roman for the Arabic alphabet in the Oriental languages.

I saw the feeling growing from the first; for, though I generally pay not the smallest attention to those matters, I had far too deep an interest in Nancy’s happiness not to watch her behaviour to everybody who saw much of her.  I knew it, I believe, before she knew it herself; and I could most easily have prevented it by merely treating Trevelyan with a little coldness, for he is a man whom the smallest rebuff would completely discourage.  But you will believe, my dearest Margaret, that no thought of such base selfishness ever passed through my mind.  I would as soon have locked my dear Nancy up in a nunnery as have put the smallest obstacle in the way of her having a good husband.  I therefore gave every facility and encouragement to both of them.  What I have myself felt it is unnecessary to say.  My parting from you almost broke my heart.  But when I parted from you I had Nancy; I had all my other relations; I had my friends; I had my country.  Now I have