as many
badly armed and worse paid ragamuffins as he could retain under his
tawdry standard, and the privilege of "occasionally sending letters of
condolence and congratulation to the King of England, in which he calls
himself his Majesty's good brother and ally."

Macaulay set forth on his journey within a week from his landing,
travelling by night, and resting while the sun was at its hottest. He
has recorded his first impressions of Hindostan in a series of journal
letters addressed to his sister Margaret. The fresh and vivid character
of those impressions--the genuine and multiform interest excited in him
by all that met his ear or eye--explain the secret of the charm which
enabled him in after days to overcome the distaste for Indian literature
entertained by that personage who, for want of a better, goes by the
name of the general reader. Macaulay reversed in his own case, the
experience of those countless writers on Indian themes who have
successively blunted their pens against the passive indifference of the
British public; for his faithful but brilliant studies of the history of
our Eastern Empire are to this day incomparably the most popular of his
works. [When published in a separate form the articles on Lord Clive and
Warren Hastings have sold nearly twice as well as the articles on Lord
Chatham, nearly thrice as well as the article on Addison, and nearly
five times as well as the article on Byron. The great Sepoy mutiny,
while it something more than doubled the sale of the essay on Warren
Hastings, all but trebled the sale of the essay on Lord Clive; but,
taking the last twenty years together, there has been little to choose
between the pair. The steadiness and permanence of the favour with which
they are regarded may be estimated by the fact that, during the five
years between 1870 and 1874, as compared with the five years between
1865 and 1869, the demand for them has been in the proportion of seven
to three; and, as compared with the five years between 1860 and 1864, in
the proportion of three to one.] It may be possible, without injury to
the fame of the author, to present a few extracts from a correspondence,
which is in some sort the raw material of productions that have already
secured their place among our national classics:

"In the afternoon of the 17th June I left Madras. My train consisted of
thirty-eight persons. I was in one palanquin, and my servant followed in
another. He is a half-caste.