the meantime,

I am ever your most affectionate father,

ZACHARY MACAULAY.

A father's prayers are seldom fulfilled to the letter. Many years
were to elapse before the son ceased to talk loudly and with
confidence; and the literature that he was destined to
distribute through the world was of another order from that which
Mr. Macaulay here suggests. The answer, which is addressed to the
mother, affords a proof that the boy could already hold his own.
The allusions to the Christian Observer, of which his father was
editor, and to Dr. Herbert Marsh, with whom the ablest pens of
Clapham were at that moment engaged in hot and embittered
controversy, are thrown in with an artist's hand.

Shelford: April 11. 1814.

My dear Mama,--The news is glorious indeed. Peace! Peace with a
Bourbon, with a descendant of Henri Quatre, with a prince who is
bound to us by all the ties of gratitude. I have some hopes that
it will be a lasting peace; that the troubles of the last twenty
years may make kings and nations wiser. I cannot conceive a
greater punishment to Buonaparte than that which the allies have
inflicted on him. How can his ambitious mind support it? All his
great projects and schemes, which once made every throne in
Europe tremble, are buried in the solitude of an Italian isle.
How miraculously everything has been conducted! We almost seem to
hear the Almighty saying to the fallen tyrant, "For this cause