Dear Ellis,—­How the months run away!  Here is another cold season; morning fogs, cloth coats, green peas, new potatoes, and all the accompaniments of a Bengal winter.  As to my private life, it has glided on, since I wrote to you last, in the most peaceful monotony.  If it were not for the books which I read, and for the bodily and mental growth of my dear little niece, I should have no mark to distinguish one part of the year from another.  Greek and Latin, breakfast; business, an evening walk with a book, a drive after sunset, dinner, coffee, my bed,—­there you have the history of a day.  My classical studies go on vigorously.  I have read Demosthenes twice,—­I need not say with what delight and admiration.  I am now deep in Isocrates and from him I shall pass to Lysias.  I have finished Diodorus Siculus at last, after dawdling over him at odd times ever since last March.  He is a stupid, credulous, prosing old ass; yet I heartily wish that we had a good deal more of him.  I have read Arrian’s expedition of Alexander, together with Quintus Curtius.  I have at stray hours read Longus’s Romance and Xenophon’s Ephesiaca; and I mean to go through Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius, in the same way.  Longus is prodigiously absurd; but there is often an exquisite prettiness in the style.  Xenophon’s Novel is the basest thing to be found in Greek. [Xenophon the Ephesian lived in the third or fourth century of the Christian era.  At the end of his work Macaulay has written:  “A most stupid worthless performance, below the lowest trash of an English circulating library.”  Achilles Tatius he disposes of with the words “Detestable trash;” and the Aethiopics of Heliodorus, which he appears to have finished on Easter-day, 1837, he pronounces “The best of the Greek Romances, which is not saying much for it.”] It was discovered at Florence, little more than a hundred years ago, by an English envoy.  Nothing so detestable ever came from the Minerva Press.  I have read Theocritus again, and like him better than ever.

As to Latin, I made a heroic attempt on Pliny’s Natural History; but I stuck after getting through about a quarter of it.  I have read Ammianus Marcellinus, the worst written book in ancient Latin.  The style would disgrace a monk of the tenth century; but Marcellinus has many of the substantial qualities of a good historian.  I have gone through the Augustan history, and much other trash relating to the lower empire; curious as illustrating the state of society, but utterly worthless as composition.  I have read Statius again and thought him as bad as ever.  I really found only two lines worthy of a great poet in all the Thebais.  They are these.  What do you think of my taste?

 “Clamorem, bello qualis supremus apertis
  Urbibus, aut pelago jam descendente carina.”

I am now busy with Quintilian and Lucan, both excellent writers.  The dream of Pompey in the seventh book of the Pharsalia is a very noble piece of writing.  I hardly know an instance in poetry of so great an effect produced by means so simple.  There is something irresistibly pathetic in the lines