TO MR. BLACKWOOD.
7 Ulster Place,
Friday.
About Macaulay, if you can give me a very late day I will try and be ready with a bit of him for the June number. I say a bit, because I think I should like to try a more elaborate criticism than any I have done yet, possibly reaching to two articles. I do not know whether there is anything in the Penn controversy, or how far Marlborough is defensible; but I will send to Mr. Langford for Sir Archibald Alison’s book, which is favourable to him, is it not? Macaulay seems to me the historian of sophistication, a man who writes only and always for “society,” and knows as little of any primitive existence as a New Zealander could know of Mayfair. Everybody admires him, of course, but nobody believes in him — at least, so far as my experience goes.
I am sure you do not mean any harm; but I must say that your suggestive glimpse of open windows facing St. Andrews Bay is somewhat aggravating to people shut up in London in September; but for an invalid I get on tolerably well. The Queen of Oudh has had the politeness to bring her “troupe,” which is a picturesque one, to the house next to us. I expect, accordingly, in a few days to be quite up in Eastern costume, and ready for anything in that way you may have on your hands.