e. I have a house
about as large as Lord Dudley's in Park Lane, or rather larger, so
that I shall accommodate them without the smallest difficulty. This
arrangement is acceptable to me, because it saves me from the misery of
parting with my sister in this strange land; and is, I believe, equally
gratifying to Trevelyan, whose education, like that of other Indian
servants, was huddled up hastily at home; who has an insatiable thirst
for knowledge of every sort; and who looks on me as little less than
an oracle of wisdom. He came to me the other morning to know whether
I would advise him to keep up his Greek, which he feared he had nearly
lost. I gave him Homer, and asked him to read a page; and I found that,
like most boys of any talent who had been at the Charterhouse, he was
very well grounded in that language. He read with perfect rapture, and
has marched off with the book, declaring that he shall never be content
till he has finished the whole. This, you will think, is not a bad
brother-in-law for a man to pick up in 22 degrees of North latitude, and
100 degrees of East longitude.

I read much, and particularly Greek; and I find that I am, in all
essentials, still not a bad scholar. I could, I think, with a year's
hard study, qualify myself to fight a good battle for a Craven's
scholarship. I read, however, not as I read at College, but like a
man of the world. If I do not know a word, I pass it by unless it is
important to the sense. If I find, as I have of late often found, a
passage which refuses to give up its meaning at the second reading, I
let it alone. I have read during the last fortnight, before breakfast,
three books of Herodotus, and four plays of Aeschylus. My admiration of
Aeschylus has been prodigiously increased by this reperusal. I cannot
conceive how any person of the smallest pretension to taste should doubt
about his immeasurable superiority to every poet of antiquity, Homer
only excepted. Even Milton, I think, must yield to him. It is quite
unintelligible to me that the ancient critics should have placed him
so low. Horace's notice of him in the Ars Poetica is quite ridiculous.
There is, to be sure, the "magnum loqui;" but the great topic insisted
on is the skill of Aeschylus as a manager, as a property-man; the
judicious way in which he boarded the stage; the masks, the buskins, and
the dresses.

["Post hunc personae pallaeque repertor honestae
Aeschylus et modicis instravit pulpita tignis