Ever, dear Ellis,

Your affectionate friend

T. B. MACAULAY.

Calcutta:  August 25, 1835.

Dear Ellis,—­Cameron arrived here about a fortnight ago, and we are most actively engaged in preparing a complete Criminal Code for India.  He and I agree excellently.  Ryan, the most liberal of Judges, lends us his best assistance.  I heartily hope, and fully believe, that we shall put the whole Penal law, and the whole law of Criminal Procedure, into a moderately sized volume.  I begin to take a very warm interest in this work.  It is, indeed, one of the finest employments of the intellect that it is easy to conceive.  I ought, however, to tell you that, the more progress I make as a legislator, the more intense my contempt for the mere technical study of law becomes.

I am deep in the examination of the political theories of the old philosophers.  I have read Plato’s Republic, and his laws; and I am now reading Aristotle’s Politics; after which I shall go through Plato’s two treatises again.  I every now and then read one of Plutarch’s Lives on an idle afternoon; and in this way I have got through a dozen of them.  I like him prodigiously.  He is inaccurate, to be sure, and a romancer; but he tells a story delightfully, and his illustrations and sketches of character are as good as anything in ancient eloquence.  I have never, till now, rated him fairly.

As to Latin, I am just finishing Lucan, who remains pretty much where he was in my opinion; and I am busily engaged with Cicero, whose character, moral and intellectual, interests me prodigiously.  I think that I see the whole man through and through.  But this is too vast a subject for a letter.  I have gone through all Ovid’s poems.  I admire him; but I was tired to death before I got to the end.  I amused myself one evening with turning over the Metamorphoses, to see if I could find any passage of ten lines which could, by possibility, have been written by Virgil.  Whether I was in ill luck or no I cannot tell; but I hunted for half an hour without the smallest success.  At last I chanced to light on a little passage more Virgilian, to my thinking, than Virgil himself.  Tell me what you say to my criticism.  It is part of Apollo’s speech to the laurel

                        Semper habebunt
 Te coma, te citharae, te nostrae, laure, pharetrae
 Tu ducibus Latiis aderis, cum laeta triumphum
 Vox canet, et longas visent Capitolia pompas. 
 Portibus Augustis cadem fidissima custos
 Ante fores stabis, mediamque tuebere quercum.

As to other Latin writers, Sallust has gone sadly down in my opinion.  Caesar has risen wonderfully.  I think him fully entitled to Cicero’s praise. [In the dialogue “De Claris Oratoribus” Cicero makes Atticus say that ’A consummate judge of style (who is evidently intended for Cicero himself,) pronounces Caesar’s Latin to be the most elegant, with one implied exception, that had ever been heard