Dear Ellis,—­I am at present very much worked, and have been so for a long time past.  Cameron, after being laid up for some months, sailed at Christmas for the Cape, where I hope his health will be repaired; for this country can very ill spare him.  However, we have almost brought our great work to a conclusion.  In about a month we shall lay before the Government a complete penal Code for a hundred millions of people, with a commentary explaining and defending the provisions of the text.  Whether it is well, or ill, done heaven knows.  I only know that it seems to me to be very ill done when I look at it by itself; and well done when I compare it with Livingstone’s Code, with the French Code, or with the English statutes which have been passed 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.”]