easons, and which discusses over its breakfast table at home the
decisions arrived at on the previous afternoon in the Council-room of
Simla or Calcutta. In those rural parsonages and middle-class households
where service in our Eastern territories now presents itself in the
light of a probable and desirable destiny for a promising son, those
same territories were forty years ago regarded as an obscure and distant
region of disease and death. A girl who had seen no country more foreign
than Wales, and crossed no water broader and more tempestuous than the
Mersey, looked forward to a voyage which (as she subsequently learned
by melancholy experience), might extend over six weary months, with an
anxiety that can hardly be imagined by us who spend only half as many
weeks on the journey between Dover and Bombay. A separation from
beloved relations under such conditions was a separation indeed; and, if
Macaulay and his sister could have foreseen how much of what they left
at their departure they would fail to find on their return, it is a
question whether any earthly consideration could have induced them to
quit their native shore. But Hannah's sense of duty was too strong for
these doubts and tremors; and, happily, (for on the whole her resolution
was a fortunate one,) she resolved to accompany her brother in an
expatriation which he never would have faced without her. With a mind
set at ease by a knowledge of her intention, he came down to Liverpool
as soon as the Session was at an end; and carried her off on a jaunt to
Edinburgh, in a post-chaise furnished with Horace Walpole's letters for
their common reading, and Smollett's collected works for his own.
Before October he was back at the Board of Control; and his letters
recommenced, as frequent and rather more serious and business-like than
of old.

London: October 5, 1833

Dear Hannah,--Life goes on so quietly here, or rather stands so still,
that I have nothing, or next to nothing, to say. At the Athenaeum I now
and then fall in with some person passing through town on his way to the
Continent or to Brighton. The other day I met Sharp, and had a long talk
with him about everything and everybody,--metaphysics, poetry, politics,
scenery, and painting. One thing I have observed in Sharp, which is
quite peculiar to him among town-wits and diners-out. He never talks
scandal. If he can say nothing good of a man, he holds his tongue. I do
not, of course, mean that in confide