t, with a sepoy to
guard him, was fairly on his road and out of danger."

Early next morning Macaulay began to descend the pass.

"After going down for about an hour we emerged from the clouds and
moisture, and the plain of Mysore lay before us--a vast ocean of foliage
on which the sun was shining gloriously. I am very little given to cant
about the beauties of nature, but I was moved almost to tears. I jumped
off the palanquin, and walked in front of it down the immense declivity.
In two hours we descended about three thousand feet. Every turning in
the road showed the boundless forest below in some new point of view. I
was greatly struck with the resemblance which this prodigious jungle, as
old as the world and planted by nature, bears to the fine works of the
great English landscape gardeners. It was exactly a Wentworth Park, as
large as Devonshire. After reaching the foot of the hills, we travelled
through a succession of scenes which might have been part of the garden
of Eden. Such gigantic trees I never saw. In a quarter of an hour I
passed hundreds the smallest of which would bear a comparison with any
of those oaks which are shown as prodigious in England. The grass, the
weeds, and the wild flowers grew as high as my head. The sun, almost
a stranger to me, was now shining brightly; and, when late in the
afternoon I again got out of my palanquin and looked back, I saw the
large mountain ridge from which I had descended twenty miles behind me,
still buried in the same mass of fog and rain in which I had been living
for weeks.

"On Tuesday, the 16th" (of September), "I went on board at Madras. I
amused myself on the voyage to Calcutta with learning Portuguese, and
made myself almost as well acquainted with it as I care to be. I
read the Lusiad, and am now reading it a second time. I own that I am
disappointed in Camoens; but I have so often found my first impressions
wrong on such subjects that I still hope to be able to join my voice to
that of the great body of critics. I never read any famous foreign book,
which did not, in the first perusal, fall short of my expectations;
except Dante's poem, and Don Quixote, which were prodigiously superior
to what I had imagined. Yet in these cases I had not pitched my
expectations low."

He had not much time for his Portuguese studies. The run was unusually
fast, and the ship only spent a week in the Bay of Bengal, and
forty-eight hours in the Hooghly. He found his siste