"I am dunned unmercifully by place-hunters.

The oddest application that I have received is from that rascal -- , who is somewhere in the interior.

He tells me he is sure that prosperity has not changed me; that I am still the same John Macaulay who was his dearest friend, his more than brother; and that he means to come up, and live with me at Calcutta.

If he fulfils his intention, I will have him taken before the police-magistrates."] These, in my opinion, are the flower of Calcutta society, and I often ask some of them to a quiet dinner." On the Friday of every week, these chosen few met round Macaulay's breakfast table to discuss the progress which the Law Commission had made in its labours; and each successive point which was started opened the way to such a flood of talk,--legal, historical, political, and personal,--that the company would sit far on towards noon over the empty teacups, until an uneasy sense of accumulating despatch-boxes drove them, one by one, to their respective offices.
There are scattered passages in these letters which prove that Macaulay's feelings, during his protracted absence from his native country, were at times almost as keen as those which racked the breast of Cicero, when he was forced to exchange the triumphs of the Forum, and the cozy suppers with his brother augurs, for his hateful place of banishment at Thessalonica, or his hardly less hateful seat of government at Tarsus.

The complaints of the English statesman do not, however, amount in volume to a fiftieth part of those reiterated out pourings of lachrymose eloquence with which the Roman philosopher bewailed an expatriation that was hardly one-third as long.