Ever yours affectionately

T. B. MACAULAY.

To Macvey Napier, Esq.

Calcutta:  November 26, 1836.

Dear Napier,—­At last I send you an article of interminable length about Lord Bacon.  I hardly know whether it is not too long for an article in a Review; but the subject is of such vast extent that I could easily have made the paper twice as long as it is.

About the historical and political part there is no great probability that we shall differ in opinion; but what I have said about Bacon’s philosophy is widely at variance with what Dugald Stuart, and Mackintosh, have said on the same subject.  I have not your essay; nor have I read it since I read it at Cambridge, with very great pleasure, but without any knowledge of the subject.  I have at present only a very faint and general recollection of its contents, and have in vain tried to procure a copy of it here.  I fear, however, that, differing widely as I do from Stewart and Mackintosh, I shall hardly agree with you.  My opinion is formed, not at second hand, like those of nine-tenths of the people who talk about Bacon; but after several very attentive perusals of his greatest works, and after a good deal of thought.  If I am in the wrong, my errors may set the minds of others at work, and may be the means of bringing both them, and me, to a knowledge of the truth.  I never bestowed so much care on anything that I have written.  There is not a sentence in the latter half of the article which has not been repeatedly recast.  I have no expectation that the popularity of the article will bear any proportion to the trouble which I have expended on it.  But the trouble has been so great a pleasure to me that I have already been greatly overpaid.  Pray look carefully to the printing.

In little more than a year I shall be embarking for England, and I have determined to employ the four months of my voyage in mastering the German language.  I should be much obliged to you to send me out, as early as you can, so that they may be certain to arrive in time, the best grammar, and the best dictionary, that can be procured; a German Bible; Schiller’s works; Goethe’s works; and Niebuhr’s History, both in the original, and in the translation.  My way of learning a language is always to begin with the Bible, which I can read without a dictionary.  After a few days passed in this way, I am master of all the common particles, the common rules of syntax, and a pretty large vocabulary.  Then I fall on some good classical work.  It was in this way that I learned both Spanish and Portuguese, and I shall try the same course with German.

I have little or nothing to tell you about myself.  My life has flowed away here with strange rapidity.  It seems but yesterday that I left my country; and I am writing to beg you to hasten preparations for my return.  I continue to enjoy perfect health, and the little political squalls which I have had to weather here are mere capfuls of wind to a man who has gone through the great hurricanes of English faction.