decimos." We have no doubt of it; but we question whether Colebrooke's Institutes or the land-tenures of India had a very large share of his attention. Indeed, what must strike every reader with astonishment, is the vast amount of classical reading and research, to which, judging from these letters, Macaulay's time was habitually devoted at Calcutta.
"During the last thirteen months I have read Æschylus twice; Sophocles twice; Euripides once; Pindar twice; Callimachus; Apollonius Rhodius; Quintus Calaber; Theocritus twice; Herodotus; Thucydides; almost all Xenophon's works; almost all Plato; Aristotle's "Politics," and a good deal of his "Organon," besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch's "Lives; " about half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Terence twice; Lucretius twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius Italicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar; and, lastly, Cicero. I have, indeed, still a little of Cicero left; but I shall finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristophanes and Lucian."
That the enormous list of classical works recorded in the foregoing letter was not only read through, but read with care, is proved by the pencil-marks, single, double, and treble, which meander down the margin of such passages as excited the admiration of the student; and by the remarks, literary, historical, and grammatical, with which the critic has interspersed every volume, and sometimes every page. In the case of a favourite writer, Macaulay frequently corrects the errors of the press, and even the punctuation, as minutely as if he were preparing the book for another edition. He read Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes four times through at Calcutta; and Euripides thrice. In his copy of Quintus Calaber, (a versifier who is less unknown by the title of Quintus Smyrnæus,) appear the entries
"September 22, 1835.
Turned over, July 13, 1837."
It maybe doubted whether the Pandects would have attained the celebrity which they enjoy, if, in the course of the three years during which Justinian's law commission was at work, the president Tribonian had read Quintus Smyrnæus twice.
The Indian empire is a subject so vast and so profound, even to those whose lives have been spent in its service, that it is not too much to ask of the most gifted members of the Indian government that they should give it all their attention. But though Macaulay's knowledge of India was superficial, it would be unjust to suppose that his presence in the council was not of great value. He brought to Indian administration an intelligence, admirably stored by study and experience, with the most enlightened views of government; and his minutes are models of good judgment and practical sagacity. The part he took in India was essentially the application of sound liberal principles to a government which had till then been singularly jealous, close, and repressive. Thus he vindicated with the greatest energy the liberty of the Indian press, he maintained the equality of Europeans and natives before the law, and he gave an impulse to the work of education, to which the prodigious progress of the native races in the last thirty years, through the study of the English language, is mainly attributable. His greatest legislative work, in his own judgment, was the draft of a penal code—a subject which required less special technical knowledge of India than many others—for the rules of evidence and the definitions of offences might be common to all mankind. But twenty-two years elapsed before this code was promulgated. It was revised with great care and labour by experienced lawyers, and it owes a good deal to other hands, more especially to Sir Barnes Peacock, by whom it was at last brought into operation. Mr. Trevelyan quotes the high authority of Mr. Fitzjames Stephen in support of the fact that Macaulay had, somehow or other, acquired a very considerable knowledge of English criminal law, however little he had practised it. All these enlightened measures and reforms drew down on him a torrent of abuse, especially from the English society in Calcutta and the Mofussil, to which he seems to have been entirely indifferent. And as he strolled up and down his garden at early dawn or in the full splendour of Indian moonlight, his mind became gradually more and more indifferent to politics. What, he said, is the fame of Townshend to that of Hume, of Lord North to that of Gibbon, of Lord Chatham to that of Johnson?
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 stpmachs to Roebuck and to Praed.
At the close of 1837 Macaulay embarked with his sister and her husband in the "Lord Hungerford" East Indiaman to return to England. The voyage was long and stormy. Zachary Macaulay died, in May 1838, before his children reached
