"I am sorry to be obliged, from want of health and a number of other engagements, which I am little able to perform, to decline the flattering offer you make me. I am also afraid that I should not be able to do the article in question, or yourself, justice, for I am not only without books, but without knowledge of what books are necessary to be consulted on the subject. To get up an article in a Review on any subject of general literature is quite as much as I can do without exposing myself. The object of an Encyclopædia is, I take it, to condense and combine all the facts relating to a subject, and all the theories of any consequence already known or advanced. Now, where the business of such a work ends, is just where I begin--that is, I might perhaps throw in an idle speculation or two of my own, not contained in former accounts of the subject, and which would have very little pretensions to rank as scientific. I know something about Congreve, but nothing at all of Aristophanes, and yet I conceive that the writer of an article on the Drama ought to be as well acquainted with the one as the other." The honesty of this is quite refreshing. There is one more letter, of a similar order, which deserves to be signalized. In August, 1843, Macaulay, being pressed for more frequent contributions, writes from the Albany that he can promise, at the very utmost, no more than two articles in a year:-- "I ought to give my whole leisure to my History; and I fear that if I suffer myself to be diverted from that design as I have done, I shall, like poor Mackintosh, leave behind me the character of a man who would have done something if he had concentrated his powers instead of frittering them away. There are people who can carry on twenty works at a time. Southey would write the history of Brazil before breakfast, an ode after breakfast, then the history of the Peninsular War till dinner, and an article for the _Quarterly Review_ in the evening. But I am of a different temper. I never write so as to please myself until my subject has for the time driven away every other out of my head. When I turn from one work to another a great deal of time is lost in the mere transition. I must not go on dawdling and reproaching myself all my life."