_Iliad_ and
the _Odyssey_. Great poets appeared at long intervals. As he reckoned
them, there had been but six given to the world--Homer, Shakespeare,
Dante, Milton, Sophocles and AEschylus. With the exception of the last
two, there had been great spaces of time between these. Could it be
supposed that at the very dawn of history there was a group, as it
were, of men each in the highest degree gifted with "the vision and
the faculty divine"? Then as to the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ being both
the production of Homer: if we admitted one to be, that the other was
would follow as a matter of course. It was the old test of Paley over
again--the finding the watch, and the presumption from it of a maker;
and in this case there was the watchmaker's shop close by. He urged,
too, that Homer was the only great poet who did not in narrating past
events use the present tense--speak of them as if happening at the
moment. He quoted long passages from _Paradise Lost_ to show how
Milton would fall into the present tense, though he might have begun
in the past. The fact that throughout the many thousand lines of Homer
no instance of the sort could be found seemed to make it clear that
but one mind produced them. It was very interesting to hear Macaulay
recite Milton, for whom he had such passionate admiration. He made
quotations also from Burns and from old ballads in illustration of
some theory which I do not recall, but showing his wonderful memory.
He had, indeed, an altogether marvelous facility in producing
passages as he might need them for whatever subject he was discussing.
Greville, writing of him in 1836, says that he displayed feats of
memory unequaled by any other human being, and that he could repeat
all Milton and all Demosthenes and a great part of the Bible. "But
his great _forte_," Greville adds, "is history, especially English
history. Here his superhuman memory, which appears to have the faculty
of digesting and arranging, as well as of retaining, has converted
his mind into a mighty magazine of knowledge, from which, with the
precision and correctness of a kind of intellectual machine, he pours
forth stores of learning, information, precept, example, anecdote and
illustration with a familiarity and facility not less astonishing than
delightful."

Our evening was all too short. The talk had never flagged, and so the
time had gone quickly by. I may note that in the discussions about
Homer, Mr. Herbert Coleridge had shown