s ago; and, if we had determined to brave the rains without
any precautions, we should, in all probability, have had the roof down
on our heads. Accordingly we were forced to migrate for six weeks from
our stately apartments and our flower-beds, to a dungeon where we were
stifled with the stench of native cookery, and deafened by the noise
of native music. At last we have returned to our house. We found it
all snow-white and pea-green; and we rejoice to think that we shall not
again be under the necessity of quitting it, till we quit it for a ship
bound on a voyage to London.

We have been for some months in the middle of what the people here think
a political storm. To a person accustomed to the hurricanes of English
faction this sort of tempest in a horsepond is merely ridiculous.
We have put the English settlers up the country under the exclusive
jurisdiction of the Company's Courts in civil actions in which they are
concerned with natives. The English settlers are perfectly contented;
but the lawyers of the Supreme Court have set up a yelp which they think
terrible, and which has infinitely diverted me. They have selected me as
the object of their invectives, and I am generally the theme of five
or six columns of prose and verse daily. I have not patience to read
a tenth part of what they put forth. The last ode in my praise which I
perused began,

"Soon we hope they will recall ye,
Tom Macaulay, Tom Macaulay."

The last prose which I read was a parallel between me and Lord
Strafford.

My mornings, from five to nine, are quite my own. I still give them
to ancient literature. I have read Aristophanes twice through since
Christmas; and have also read Herodotus, and Thucydides again. I got
into a way last year of reading a Greek play every Sunday. I began on
Sunday the 18th of October with the Prometheus, and next Sunday I shall
finish with the Cyclops of Euripides. Euripides has made a complete
conquest of me. It has been unfortunate for him that we have so many
of his pieces. It has, on the other hand, I suspect, been fortunate for
Sophocles that so few of his have come down to us. Almost every play of
Sophocles, which is now extant, was one of his masterpieces. There
is hardly one of them which is not mentioned with high praise by some
ancient writer. Yet one of them, the Trachiniae, is, to my thinking,
very poor and insipid. Now, if we had nineteen plays of Sophocles, of
which twelve or thirteen should be n