ssed for the purpose of
consolidating and amending the Criminal Law. In health I am as well
as ever I was in my life. Time glides fast. One day is so like another
that, but for a habit which I acquired soon after I reached India of
pencilling in my books the date of my reading them, I should have hardly
any way of estimating the lapse of time. If I want to know when an event
took place, I call to mind which of Calderon's plays, or of Plutarch's
Lives, I was reading on that day. I turn to the book; find the date; and
am generally astonished to see that, what seems removed from me by only
two or three months, really happened nearly a year ago.

I intend to learn German on my voyage home, and I have indented largely,
(to use our Indian official term), for the requisite books. People tell
me that it is a hard language; but I cannot easily believe that there is
a language which I cannot master in four months, by working ten hours
a day. I promise myself very great delight and information from German
literature; and, over and above, I feel a soft of presentiment, a kind
of admonition of the Deity, which assures me that the final cause of my
existence,--the end for which I was sent into this vale of tears,--was
to make game of certain Germans. The first thing to be done in obedience
to this heavenly call is to learn German; and then I may perhaps try, as
Milton says,

"Frangere Saxonicas Britonum sub Marte phalanges."

Ever yours affectionately

T. B. MACAULAY.

The years which Macaulay spent in India formed a transition period
between the time when he kept no journal at all, and the time when the
daily portion of his journal was completed as regularly as the daily
portion of his History. Between 1834 and 1838, he contented himself with
jotting down any circumstance that struck his fancy in the book which he
happened to have in hand. The records of his Calcutta life, written in
half a dozen different languages, are scattered throughout the whole
range of classical literature from Hesiod to Macrobius. At the end
of the eighty-ninth Epistle of Seneca we read: "April 11, 1836. Hodie
praemia distribui tois en to mouseio Sanskritiko neaniskois. [To-day I
distributed the prizes to the students of the Sanscrit College."]

On the last page of the Birds of Aristophanes: "Jan. 16, 1836. Oi
presbeis of papa ton Basileos ton Nepauliton eisegonto khthes es
Kalkouttan." ["The ambassadors from the King of Nepaul entered Calcutta
yest