all the
three Presidencies. Macaulay writes to his sisters at home: "The best
way of seeing society here is to have very small parties. There is
a little circle of people whose friendship I value, and in whose
conversation I take pleasure: the Chief Justice, Sir Edward Ryan; my old
friend, Malkin; Cameron and Macleod, the Law Commissioners; Macnaghten,
among the older servants of the Company, and Mangles, Colvin, and John
Peter Grant among the younger. [It cannot be said that all the claims
made upon Macaulay's friendship were acknowledged as readily as those
of Sir Benjamin Malkin. "I am dunned unmercifully by place-hunters. The
oddest application that I have received is from that rascal --, who is
somewhere in the interior. He tells me he is sure that prosperity has
not changed me; that I am still the same John Macaulay who was his
dearest friend, his more than brother; and that he means to come up, and
live with me at Calcutta. If he fulfils his intention, I will have him
taken before the police-magistrates."] These, in my opinion, are the
flower of Calcutta society, and I often ask some of them to a quiet
dinner." On the Friday of every week, these chosen few met round
Macaulay's breakfast table to discuss the progress which the Law
Commission had made in its labours; and each successive point which
was started opened the way to such a flood of talk,--legal, historical,
political, and personal,--that the company would sit far on towards
noon over the empty teacups, until an uneasy sense of accumulating
despatch-boxes drove them, one by one, to their respective offices.

There are scattered passages in these letters which prove that
Macaulay's feelings, during his protracted absence from his native
country, were at times almost as keen as those which racked the breast
of Cicero, when he was forced to exchange the triumphs of the Forum,
and the cozy suppers with his brother augurs, for his hateful place
of banishment at Thessalonica, or his hardly less hateful seat of
government at Tarsus. The complaints of the English statesman do not,
however, amount in volume to a fiftieth part of those reiterated out
pourings of lachrymose eloquence with which the Roman philosopher
bewailed an expatriation that was hardly one-third as long. "I have no
words," writes Macaulay, very much under-estimating the wealth of his
own vocabulary, "to tell you how I pine for England, or how intensely
bitter exile has been to me, though I hop