You are so rich in domestic comforts that I am inclined to envy you.  I am not, however, without my share.  I am as fond of my little niece as her father.  I pass an hour or more every day in nursing her, and teaching her to talk.  She has got as far as Ba, Pa, and Ma; which, as she is not eight months old, we consider as proofs of a genius little inferior to that of Shakespeare or Sir Isaac Newton.

The municipal elections have put me in good spirits as to English politics.  I was rather inclined to despondency.

Ever yours affectionately

T. B. MACAULAY.

Calcutta:  July 25, 1836.

My dear Ellis,—­I have heard from you again, and glad I always am to hear from you.  There are few things to which I look forward with more pleasure than to our meeting.  It is really worth while to go into banishment for a few years for the pleasure of going home again.  Yet that home will in some things be a different home—­oh how different a home!—­from that to which I expected to return.  But I will not stir up the bitterness of sorrow which has at last subsided.

You take interest, I see, in my Greek and Latin studies.  I continue to pursue them steadily and actively.  I am now reading Demosthenes with interest and admiration indescribable.  I am slowly, at odd minutes, getting through the stupid trash of Diodorus.  I have read through Seneca, and an affected empty scribbler he is.  I have read Tacitus again, and, by the bye, I will tell you a curious circumstance relating to that matter.  In my younger days I always thought the Annals a prodigiously superior work to the History.  I was surprised to find that the Annals seemed cold and poor to me on the last reading.  I began to think that I had overrated Tacitus.  But, when I began the History, I was enchanted, and thought more highly of him than ever.  I went back to the Annals, and liked them even better than the History.  All at once the explanation of this occurred to me.  While I was reading the Annals I was reading Thucydides.  When I began the History, I began the Hellenics.  What made the Annals appear cold and poor to me was the intense interest which Thucydides inspired.  Indeed, what colouring is there which would not look tame when placed side by side with the magnificent light, and the terrible shade, of Thucydides?  Tacitus was a great man, but he was not up to the Sicilian expedition.  When I finished Thucydides, and took up Xenophon, the case was reversed.  Tacitus had been a foil to Thucydides.  Xenophon was a foil to Tacitus.

I have read Pliny the Younger.  Some of the Epistles are interesting.  Nothing more stupid than the Panegyric was ever preached in the University church.  I am reading the Augustan History, and Aulus Gellius.  Aulus is a favourite of mine.  I think him one of the best writers of his class.