nothing except the resources of my own mind, and the consciousness of having acted not ungenerously.  But I do not repine.  Whatever I suffer I have brought on myself.  I have neglected the plainest lessons of reason and experience.  I have staked my happiness without calculating the chances of the dice.  I have hewn out broken cisterns; I have leant on a reed; I have built on the sand; and I have fared accordingly.  I must bear my punishment as I can; and, above all, I must take care that the punishment does not extend beyond myself.

Nothing can be kinder than Nancy’s conduct has been.  She proposes that we should form one family; and Trevelyan, (though, like most lovers, he would, I imagine, prefer having his goddess to himself,) consented with strong expressions of pleasure.  The arrangement is not so strange as it might seem at home.  The thing is often done here; and those quarrels between servants, which would inevitably mar any such plan in England, are not to be apprehended in an Indian establishment.  One advantage there will be in our living together of a most incontestable sort; we shall both be able to save more money.  Trevelyan will soon be entitled to his furlough; but he proposes not to take it till I go home.

I shall write in a very different style from this to my father.  To him I shall represent the marriage as what it is, in every respect except its effect on my own dreams of happiness—­a most honourable and happy event; prudent in a worldly point of view; and promising all the felicity which strong mutual affection, excellent principles on both sides, good temper, youth, health, and the general approbation of friends can afford.  As for myself, it is a tragical denouement of an absurd plot.  I remember quoting some nursery rhymes, years ago, when you left me in London to join Nancy at Rothley Temple or Leamington, I forget which.  Those foolish lines contain the history of my life.

 “There were two birds that sat on a stone;
  One flew away, and there was but one. 
  The other flew away, and then there was none;
  And the poor stone was left all alone.”

Ever, my dearest Margaret, yours

T. B. MACAULAY.

A passage from a second letter to the same person deserves to be quoted, as an instance of how a good man may be unable to read aright his own nature, and a wise man to forecast his own future.  “I feel a growing tendency to cynicism and suspicion.  My intellect remains; and is likely, I sometimes think, to absorb the whole man.  I still retain, (not only undiminished, but strengthened by the very events which have deprived me of everything else,) my thirst for knowledge; my passion for holding converse with the greatest minds of all ages and nations; any power of forgetting what surrounds me, and of living with the past, the future, the distant, and the unreal.  Books are becoming everything to me.  If I had at this moment my choice of life, I would bury myself