of art in general, and said he did not think the faculty
for it a high gift of mind. This opinion was strongly combated by Mr.
Blore the architect and others, but I remember Macaulay gave, as
in some sort an illustration of his theory, a story of Grant the
portrait-painter, then of chief eminence in London. Cornewall Lewis
was to sit to him, and Grant, knowing he had written books, desired to
get at least a smattering of them before the sittings began. But some
one, perhaps mischievously, told him Lewis was the author of _The
Monk_, and this book he accordingly read. He took an early opportunity
to refer to it to his sitter, who to his no small discomfiture
disclaimed it. As conclusive proof of the truth of this denial, Lewis
stated further that the book was written before he was born. Everybody
was amused that Cornewall Lewis, so famous for abstruse learning,
should have deemed it necessary to appeal thus to dates to show he was
not the author of a novel.

Macaulay persisted in his theory that artistic power was not an
intellectual faculty, but I could not quite determine whether he was
not putting it forth as mere paradox. One could fancy the paroxysm of
rage into which Haydon would have been thrown had such a theory
been advanced in his presence; or Fuseli, who, as Haydon reports,
exclaimed, on first seeing the Elgin Marbles, with his strange accent,
"Those Greeks, they were _godes_." But the thought of Michel Angelo
and of Lionardo was a sufficient answer to the theory.

Macaulay, in further support of his general proposition, maintained
that a man might be a great musical composer and yet not in the true
sense a man of genius. He instanced Mozart, who, he said, was not
claimed to have been of high intellectual ability. Mr. Herbert
Coleridge said he thought this a mistake, but he urged that full
details were wanting in regard to his mental capacity as shown in
other ways than in music. Macaulay replied that Mozart was the Raphael
of music, and was both a composer and a wonderful performer at the age
of six. "Now," said he, "we cannot conceive of any one being a great
poet at the age of six: we hear nothing of Shakespeare or Milton at
the age of six."

The conversation turned to Homer and the question whether the Homeric
poems were the product of one mind. Macaulay maintained they were. It
was inconceivable, he said, that there could have been at the Homeric
period five or six poets equal to the production of the