We have been for some months in the middle of what the people here think a political storm.  To a person accustomed to the hurricanes of English faction this sort of tempest in a horsepond is merely ridiculous.  We have put the English settlers up the country under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Company’s Courts in civil actions in which they are concerned with natives.  The English settlers are perfectly contented; but the lawyers of the Supreme Court have set up a yelp which they think terrible, and which has infinitely diverted me.  They have selected me as the object of their invectives, and I am generally the theme of five or six columns of prose and verse daily.  I have not patience to read a tenth part of what they put forth.  The last ode in my praise which I perused began,

 “Soon we hope they will recall ye,
  Tom Macaulay, Tom Macaulay.”

The last prose which I read was a parallel between me and Lord Strafford.

My mornings, from five to nine, are quite my own.  I still give them to ancient literature.  I have read Aristophanes twice through since Christmas; and have also read Herodotus, and Thucydides again.  I got into a way last year of reading a Greek play every Sunday.  I began on Sunday the 18th of October with the Prometheus, and next Sunday I shall finish with the Cyclops of Euripides.  Euripides has made a complete conquest of me.  It has been unfortunate for him that we have so many of his pieces.  It has, on the other hand, I suspect, been fortunate for Sophocles that so few of his have come down to us.  Almost every play of Sophocles, which is now extant, was one of his masterpieces.  There is hardly one of them which is not mentioned with high praise by some ancient writer.  Yet one of them, the Trachiniae, is, to my thinking, very poor and insipid.  Now, if we had nineteen plays of Sophocles, of which twelve or thirteen should be no better than the Trachiniae,—­and if, on the other hand, only seven pieces of Euripides had come down to us, and if those seven had been the Medea, the Bacchae, the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Orestes, the Phoenissae, the Hippolytus, and the Alcestis, I am not sure that the relative position which the two poets now hold in our estimation would not be greatly altered.

I have not done much in Latin.  I have been employed in turning over several third-rate and fourth-rate writers.  After finishing Cicero, I read through the works of both the Senecas, father and son.  There is a great deal in the Controversiae both of curious information, and of judicious criticism.  As to the son, I cannot bear him.  His style affects me in something the same way with that of Gibbon.  But Lucius Seneca’s affectation is even more rank than Gibbon’s.  His works are made up of mottoes.  There is hardly a sentence which might not be quoted; but to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce.  I have read, as one does read such stuff, Valerius Maximus, Annaeus Florus, Lucius Ampelius, and Aurelius Victor.  I have also gone through Phaedrus.  I am now better employed.  I am deep in the Annals of Tacitus, and I am at the same time reading Suetonius.