in the Senate or the Forum’.  Atticus then goes on to detail at full length a compliment which Caesar had paid to Cicero’s powers of expression; and Brutus declares with enthusiasm that such praise, coming from such a quarter, is worth more than a Triumph, as Triumphs were then given; and inferior in value only to the honours which were voted to the statesman who had baffled Catiline.  The whole passage is a model of self-glorification, exquisite in skill and finish.] He has won the honour of an excellent historian while attempting merely to give hints for history.  But what are they all to the great Athenian?  I do assure you that there is no prose composition in the world, not even the De Corona, which I place so high as the seventh book of Thucydides.  It is the ne plus ultra of human art.  I was delighted to find in Gray’s letters the other day this query to Wharton:  “The retreat from Syracuse—­Is it or is it not the finest thing you ever read in your life?”

Did you ever read Athenaeus through?  I never did; but I am meditating an attack on him.  The multitude of quotations looks very tempting; and I never open him for a minute without being paid for my trouble.

Yours very affectionately

T. B. MACAULAY.

Calcutta:  December 30, 1835,

Dear Ellis,—­What the end of the Municipal Reform Bill is to be I cannot conjecture.  Our latest English intelligence is of the 15th of August.  The Lords were then busy in rendering the only great service that I expect them ever to render to the nation; that is to say, in hastening the day of reckoning. [In the middle of August the Irish Tithe Bill went up to the House of Lords, where it was destined to undergo a mutilation which was fatal to its existence.] But I will not fill my paper with English politics.

I am in excellent health.  So are my sister and brother-in-law, and their little girl, whom I am always nursing; and of whom I am becoming fonder than a wise man, with half my experience, would choose to be of anything except himself.  I have but very lately begun to recover my spirits.  The tremendous blow which fell on me at the beginning of this year has left marks behind it which I shall carry to my grave.  Literature has saved my life and my reason.  Even now, I dare not, in the intervals of business, remain alone for a minute without a book in my hand.  What my course of life will be, when I return to England, is very doubtful.  But I am more than half determined to abandon politics, and to give myself wholly to letters; to undertake some great historical work, which may be at once the business and the amusement of my life; and to leave the pleasures of pestiferous rooms, sleepless nights, aching heads, and diseased stomachs to Roebuck and to Praed.