dge. As to my early bon-mots, my
crying for holidays, my walks to school through showers of cats and
dogs, I have left all those for the "Life of the late Right Honourable
Thomas Babington Macaulay, with large extracts from his correspondence,
in two volumes, by the Very Rev. J. Macaulay, Dean of Durham, and Rector
of Bishopsgate, with a superb portrait from the picture by Pickersgill
in the possession of the Marquis of Lansdowne."

As you like my verses, I will some day or other write you a whole
rhyming letter. I wonder whether any man ever wrote doggrel so easily. I
run it off just as fast as my pen can move, and that is faster by about
three words in a minute than any other pen that I know. This comes of
a schoolboy habit of writing verses all day long. Shall I tell you the
news in rhyme? I think I will send you a regular sing-song gazette.

We gained a victory last night as great as e'er was known.
We beat the Opposition upon the Russian loan.
They hoped for a majority, and also for our places.
We won the day by seventy-nine. You should have seen their faces.
Old Croker, when the shout went down our rank, looked blue with rage.
You'd have said he had the cholera in the spasmodic stage.
Dawson was red with ire as if his face was smeared with berries;
But of all human visages the worst was that of Herries.
Though not his friend, my tender heart I own could not but feel
A little for the misery of poor Sir Robert Peel.
But hang the dirty Tories! and let them starve and pine!
Huzza for the majority of glorious seventy-nine!

Ever yours

T. B. M.

To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay.

House of Commons Smoking-Room

July 23, 1832.

My dear Sisters,--I am writing here, at eleven at night, in this
filthiest of all filthy atmospheres, and in the vilest of all vile
company; with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils, and the ugly,
hypocritical face of Lieutenant ---- before my eyes. There he sits
writing opposite to me. To whom, for a ducat? To some secretary of an
Hibernian Bible Society; or to some old woman who gives cheap tracts,
instead of blankets, to the starving peasantry of Connemara; or to
some good Protestant Lord who bullies his Popish tenants. Reject not my
letter, though it is redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail; for this is
the room--

The room,--but I think I'll describe it in rhyme, That smells of tobacco
and chloride of lime. The smell of tobacco was always the same; But the
chloride w