do at Clapham.  Papa may laugh, and indeed he did laugh me out of my taste at Clapham; but I think that there is a great deal of beauty in the first melody, “She walks in beauty,” though indeed who it is that walks in beauty is not very exactly defined.  My next letter shall contain a production of my muse, entitled “An Inscription for the Column of Waterloo,” which is to be shown to Mr. Preston to-morrow.  What he may think of it I do not know.  But I am like my favourite Cicero about my own productions.  It is all one to me what others think of them.  I never like them a bit less for being disliked by the rest of mankind.  Mr. Preston has desired me to bring him up this evening two or three subjects for a Declamation.  Those which I have selected are as follows:  1st, a speech in the character of Lord Coningsby, impeaching the Earl of Oxford; 2nd, an essay on the utility of standing armies; 3rd, an essay on the policy of Great Britain with regard to continental possessions.  I conclude with sending my love to Papa, Selina, Jane, John, ("but he is not there,” as Fingal pathetically says, when in enumerating his sons who should accompany him to the chase he inadvertently mentions the dead Ryno,) Henry, Fanny, Hannah, Margaret, and Charles.  Valete.

T.B.  Macaulay.

This exhaustive enumeration of his brothers and sisters invites attention to that home where he reigned supreme.  Lady Trevelyan thus describes their life at Clapham:  “I think that my father’s strictness was a good counterpoise to the perfect worship of your uncle by the rest of the family.  To us he was an object of passionate love and devotion.  To us he could do no wrong.  His unruffled sweetness of temper, his unfailing flow of spirits, his amusing talk, all made his presence so delightful that his wishes and his tastes were our law.  He hated strangers; and his notion of perfect happiness was to see us all working round him while he read aloud a novel, and then to walk all together on the Common, or, if it rained, to have a frightfully noisy game of hide-and-seek.  I have often wondered how our mother could ever have endured our noise in her little house.  My earliest recollections speak of the intense happiness of the holidays, beginning with finding him in Papa’s room in the morning; the awe at the idea of his having reached home in the dark after we were in bed, and the Saturnalia which at once set in;—­no lessons; nothing but fun and merriment for the whole six weeks.  In the year 1816 we were at Brighton for the summer holidays, and he read to us Sir Charles Grandison.  It was always a habit in our family to read aloud every evening.  Among the books selected I can recall Clarendon, Burnet, Shakspeare, (a great treat when my mother took the volume,) Miss Edgeworth, Mackenzie’s Lounger and Mirror, and, as a standing dish, the Quarterly and the Edinburgh Reviews.  Poets too, especially Scott and Crabbe, were constantly chosen.  Poetry and novels, except during Tom’s holidays, were forbidden in the daytime, and stigmatised as ‘drinking drams in the morning.’”