Making, as always, the best of everything, he was quite ready to allow that he might have been placed in a still less agreeable situation.  In the following extract from a letter to his friend, Mrs. Drummond, there is much which will come home to those who are old enough to remember how vastly the Dublin of 1837 differed, for the worse, from the Dublin of 1875, “It now seems likely that you may remain in Ireland for years.  I cannot conceive what has induced you to submit to such an exile.  I declare, for my own part, that, little as I love Calcutta, I would rather stay here than be settled in the Phoenix Park.  The last residence which I would choose would be a place with all the plagues, and none of the attractions, of a capital; a provincial city on fire with factions political and religious, peopled by raving Orangemen and raving Repealers, and distracted by a contest between Protestantism as fanatical as that of Knot and Catholicism as fanatical as that of Bonner.  We have our share of the miseries of life in this country.  We are annually baked four months, boiled four more, and allowed the remaining four to become cool if we can.  At this moment, the sun is blazing like a furnace.  The earth, soaked with oceans of rain, is steaming like a wet blanket.  Vegetation is rotting all round us.  Insects and undertakers are the only living creatures which seem to enjoy the climate.  But, though our atmosphere is hot, our factions are lukewarm.  A bad epigram in a newspaper, or a public meeting attended by a tailor, a pastry-cook, a reporter, two or three barristers, and eight or ten attorneys, are our most formidable annoyances.  We have agitators in our own small way, Tritons of the minnows, bearing the same sort of resemblance to O’Connell that a lizard bears to an alligator.  Therefore Calcutta for me, in preference to Dublin.”

He had good reason for being grateful to Calcutta, and still better for not showing his gratitude by prolonging his stay there over a fourth summer and autumn.  “That tremendous crash of the great commercial houses which took place a few years ago has produced a revolution in fashions.  It ruined one half of the English society in Bengal, and seriously injured the other half.  A large proportion of the most important functionaries here are deeply in debt, and accordingly, the mode of living is now exceedingly quiet and modest.  Those immense subscriptions, those public tables, those costly equipages and entertainments of which Heber, and others who saw Calcutta a few years back, say so much, are never heard of.  Speaking for myself, it was a great piece of good fortune that I came hither just at the time when the general distress had forced everybody to adopt a moderate way of living.  Owing very much to that circumstance, (while keeping house, I think, more handsomely than any other member of Council,) I have saved what will enable me to do my part towards making my family comfortable; and I shall have a competency for myself, small indeed,