ted to find in Gray's letters the other day this query to
Wharton: "The retreat from Syracuse--Is it or is it not the finest thing
you ever read in your life?"

Did you ever read Athenaeus through? I never did; but I am meditating
an attack on him. The multitude of quotations looks very tempting; and I
never open him for a minute without being paid for my trouble.

Yours very affectionately

T. B. MACAULAY.

Calcutta: December 30, 1835,

Dear Ellis,--What the end of the Municipal Reform Bill is to be I cannot
conjecture. Our latest English intelligence is of the 15th of August.
The Lords were then busy in rendering the only great service that I
expect them ever to render to the nation; that is to say, in hastening
the day of reckoning. [In the middle of August the Irish Tithe Bill went
up to the House of Lords, where it was destined to undergo a mutilation
which was fatal to its existence.] But I will not fill my paper with
English politics.

I am in excellent health. So are my sister and brother-in-law, and their
little girl, whom I am always nursing; and of whom I am becoming fonder
than a wise man, with half my experience, would choose to be of anything
except himself. I have but very lately begun to recover my spirits. The
tremendous blow which fell on me at the beginning of this year has left
marks behind it which I shall carry to my grave. Literature has saved my
life and my reason. Even now, I dare not, in the intervals of business,
remain alone for a minute without a book in my hand. What my course of
life will be, when I return to England, is very doubtful. But I am more
than half determined to abandon politics, and to give myself wholly to
letters; to undertake some great historical work, which may be at once
the business and the amusement of my life; and to leave the pleasures of
pestiferous rooms, sleepless nights, aching heads, and diseased stomachs
to Roebuck and to Praed.

In England I might probably be of a very different opinion. But, in the
quiet of my own little grass-plot,--when the moon, at its rising, finds
me with the Philoctetes or the De Finibus in my hand,--I often wonder
what strange infatuation leads men who can do something better to
squander their intellect, their health, their energy, on such subjects
as those which most statesmen are engaged in pursuing. I comprehend
perfectly how a man who can debate, but who would make a very
indifferent figure as a contributor to an annual or a