-stains, or a few American creepers, and a little ivy, would make
it perfect; and all that will come, I suppose, with time. The terrace
is my favourite spot. I always liked "the trim gardens" of which
Milton speaks, and thought that Brown and his imitators went too far
in bringing forests and sheep-walks up to the very windows of
drawing-rooms.

I came through Oxford. It was as beautiful a day as the second day of
our visit, and the High Street was in all its glory. But it made me
quite sad to find myself there without you and Margaret. All my old
Oxford associations are gone. Oxford, instead of being, as it used
to be, the magnificent old city of the seventeenth century,--still
preserving its antique character among the improvements of modern times,
and exhibiting in the midst of upstart Birminghams and Manchesters the
same aspect which it wore when Charles held his court at Christchurch,
and Rupert led his cavalry over Magdalene Bridge, is now to me only the
place where I was so happy with my little sisters. But I was restored to
mirth, and even to indecorous mirth, by what happened after we had
left the fine old place behind us. There was a young fellow of about
five-and-twenty, mustachioed and smartly dressed, in the coach with
me. He was not absolutely uneducated; for he was reading a novel, the
Hungarian brothers, the whole way. We rode, as I told you, through the
High Street. The coach stopped to dine; and this youth passed half an
hour in the midst of that city of palaces. He looked about him with his
mouth open, as he re-entered the coach, and all the while that we were
driving away past the Ratcliffe Library, the Great Court of All Souls,
Exeter, Lincoln, Trinity, Balliol, and St. John's. When we were about
a mile on the road he spoke the first words that I had heard him utter.
"That was a pretty town enough. Pray, sir, what is it called?" I could
not answer him for laughing; but he seemed quite unconscious of his own
absurdity.

Ever yours

T. B. M.

During all the period covered by this correspondence the town of Leeds
was alive with the agitation of a turbulent, but not very dubious,
contest. Macaulay's relations with the electors whose votes he was
courting are too characteristic to be omitted altogether from the story
of his life; though the style of his speeches and manifestoes is more
likely to excite the admiring envy of modern members of Parliament,
than to be taken as a model for their communica