e tigers, which prefer this situation to the
plains below for the same reason that takes so many Europeans to India;
they encounter an uncongenial climate for the sake of what they can
get." There were no books in the place except those that Macaulay had
brought with him, among which, most luckily, was Clarissa Harlowe. Aided
by the rain outside, he soon talked his favourite romance into general
favour. The reader will consent to put up with one or two slight
inaccuracies in order to have the story told by Thackeray.

"I spoke to him once about Clarissa. 'Not read Clarissa!' he cried out.
'If you have once read Clarissa, and are infected by it, you can't leave
it. When I was in India I passed one hot season in the Hills; and there
were the Governor-General, and the Secretary of Government, and the
Commander-in-Chief, and their wives. I had Clarissa with me; and,
as soon as they began to read, the whole station was in a passion of
excitement about Miss Harlowe, and her misfortunes, and her scoundrelly
Lovelace. The Governor's wife seized the book; the Secretary waited for
it; the Chief justice could not read it for tears.' He acted the whole
scene; he paced up and down the Athenaeum library. I dare say he could
have spoken pages of the book; of that book, and of what countless piles
of others!"

An old Scotch doctor, a Jacobin and a free-thinker, who could only be
got to attend church by the positive orders of the Governor-General,
cried over the last volume until he was too ill to appear at dinner.
[Degenerate readers of our own day have actually been provided with an
abridgment of Clarissa, itself as long as an ordinary novel. A wiser
course than buying the abridgment would be to commence the original
at the Third volume. In the same way, if anyone, after obtaining the
outline of Lady Clementina's story from a more adventurous friend,
will read Sir Charles Grandison, skipping all letters from Italians,
to Italians, and about Italians, he will find that he has got hold of
a delightful, and not unmanageable, book.] The Chief
Secretary,--afterwards, as Sir William Macnaghten, the hero and the
victim of the darkest episode in our Indian history,--declared that
reading this copy of Clarissa, under the inspiration of its owner's
enthusiasm, was nothing less than an epoch in his life. After the lapse
of thirty years, when Ootacamund had long enjoyed the advantage of a
book-club and a circulating library, the tradition of Mac