it is useful, is not very pleasant.  I can only ask for one book at a time, and cannot touch another till I have read it through.  We then go to church, and after we come hack I read as before till tea-time.  After tea we write out the sermon.  I cannot help thinking that Mr. Preston uses all imaginable means to make us forget it, for he gives us a glass of wine each on Sunday, and on Sunday only, the very day when we want to have all our faculties awake; and some do literally go to sleep during the sermon, and look rather silly when they wake.  I, however, have not fallen into this disaster.

Your affectionate son,

Thomas B. Macaulay.

The constant allusions to home politics and to the progress of the Continental struggle, which occur throughout Zachary Macaulay’s correspondence with his son, prove how freely, and on what an equal footing, the parent and child already conversed on questions of public interest.  The following letter is curious as a specimen of the eagerness with which the boy habitually flung himself into the subjects which occupied his father’s thoughts.  The renewal of the East India Company’s charter was just then under the consideration of Parliament, and the whole energies of the Evangelical party were exerted in order to signalise the occasion by securing our Eastern dominions as a field for the spread of Christianity.  Petitions against the continued exclusion of missionaries were in course of circulation throughout the island, the drafts of which had been prepared by Mr. Macaulay.

Shelford:  May 8, 1813.

My dear Papa,—­As on Monday it will be out of my power to write, since the examination subjects are to be given out I write to-day instead to answer your kind and long letter.

I am very much pleased that the nation seems to take such interest in the introduction of Christianity into India.  My Scotch blood begins to boil at the mention of the 1,750 names that went up from a single country parish.  Ask Mama and Selina if they do not now admit my argument with regard to the superior advantages of the Scotch over the English peasantry.

As to my examination preparations, I will if you please give you a sketch of my plan.  On Monday, the day on which the examination subjects are given out, I shall begin.  My first performance will be my verses and my declamation.  I shall then translate the Greek and Latin.  The first time of going over I shall mark the passages which puzzle me, and then return to them again.  But I shall have also to rub up my Mathematics, (by the bye, I begin the second book of Euclid to-day,) and to study whatever History may be appointed for the examination.  I shall not be able to avoid trembling, whether I know my subjects or not.  I am however intimidated at nothing but Greek.  Mathematics suit my taste, although, before I came, I declaimed against them, and asserted that, when I went to College, it should not be to Cambridge.  I am occupied with the hope of lecturing Mama and Selina upon Mathematics, as I used to do upon Heraldry, and to change Or, and Argent, and Azure, and Gules, for squares, and points, and circles, and angles, and triangles, and rectangles, and rhomboids, and in a word “all the pomp and circumstance” of Euclid.  When I come home I shall, if my purse is sufficient, bring a couple of rabbits for Selina and Jane.