As for myself, I rejoice that I am out of the present storm.  “Suave mari magno;” or, as your new Premier, if he be still Premier, construes.  “It is a source of melancholy satisfaction.”  I may, indeed, feel the effects of the changes here, but more on public than private grounds.  A Tory Governor-General is not very likely to agree with me about the very important law reforms which I am about to bring before the Council.  But he is not likely to treat me ill personally; or, if he does,

 all ou ti khairon, en tod orthothe Belos,

["It shall be to his cost, so long as this bow carries true.”]

as Philoctetes says.  In a few months I shall have enough to enable me to live, after my very moderate fashion, in perfect independence at home; and whatever debts any Governor-General may choose to lay on me at Calcutta shall be paid off, he may rely on it, with compound interest, at Westminster.

My time is divided between public business and books.  I mix with society as little as I can.  My spirits have not yet recovered,—­I sometimes think that they will never wholly recover,—­the shock which they received five months ago.  I find that nothing soothes them so much as the contemplation of those miracles of art which Athens has bequeathed to us.  I am really becoming, I hope not a pedant, but certainly an enthusiast about classical literature.  I have just finished a second reading of Sophocles.  I am now deep in Plato, and intend to go right through all his works.  His genius is above praise.  Even where he is most absurd,—­as, for example, in the Cratylus,—­he shows an acuteness, and an expanse of intellect, which is quite a phenomenon by itself.  The character of Socrates does not rise upon me.  The more I read about him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.  If he had treated me as he is said to have treated Protagoras, Hippias, and Gorgias, I could never have forgiven him.

Nothing has struck me so much in Plato’s dialogues as the raillery.  At college, somehow or other, I did not understand or appreciate it.  I cannot describe to you the way in which it now tickles me.  I often sink forward on my huge old Marsilius Ficinus in a fit of laughter.  I should say that there never was a vein of ridicule so rich, at the same time so delicate.  It is superior to Voltaire’s; nay, to Pascal’s.  Perhaps there are one or two passages in Cervantes, and one or two in Fielding, that might give a modern reader a notion of it.

I have very nearly finished Livy.  I never read him through before.  I admire him greatly, and would give a quarter’s salary to recover the lost Decades.  While I was reading the earlier books I went again through Niebuhr.  And I am sorry to say that, having always been a little sceptical about his merits, I am now a confirmed unbeliever.  I do not of course mean that he has no merit.  He was a man of immense learning, and of great ingenuity.  But his mind was utterly wanting in the faculty by