ty without having acquired any
accomplishment save that of driving, and who was so ignorant of his own
language that he had to learn it like a child, beginning with
elementary books. Lord Holland quoted Julius Caesar and Scaliger as
examples of late education, said that the latter had been wounded, and
that he had been married and commenced learning Greek the same day,
when my neighbor remarked 'that he supposed his learning Greek was not
an instantaneous act like his marriage.' This remark and the manner of
it gave me the notion that he was a dull fellow, for it came out in a
{186} way which bordered on the ridiculous so as to excite something
like a sneer. I was a little surprised to hear him continue the thread
of conversation, from Scaliger's wound, and talk of Loyola having been
wounded at Pampeluna. I wondered how he happened to know anything
about Loyola's wound. Having thus settled my opinion I went on eating
my dinner, when Auckland, who was sitting opposite to me, addressed my
neighbor: 'Mr. Macaulay, will you drink a glass of wine?' I thought I
should have dropped off my chair. It was Macaulay, the man I had been
so long most curious to see and to hear, whose genius, eloquence,
astonishing knowledge, and diversified talents have excited my wonder
and admiration for such a length of time, and here I had been sitting
next to him, hearing him talk, and setting him down for a dull fellow."
We are here only at the opening of Macaulay's great career. Even at
this time the world seemed to have made up its mind that Macaulay had a
great career before him. At the present day, when more than forty
years have passed over his tomb in Westminster Abbey, it is a question
still keenly contested every now and then, whether Macaulay fully
realized or barely failed to realize the expectations which men were
forming of him on that day when Charles Greville met him for the first
time, and was amazed to find, as the conversation went on, that he was
sitting next to Macaulay.

[Sidenote: 1832--Death of Sir Walter Scott]

The year of the Reform Bill was marked by an event forever memorable in
the history of literature. That event was the death of Sir Walter
Scott. The later years of Scott's life, as we all know, had been
darkened by the failure of his publishers, by the money troubles in
which that failure had involved him, by the exhausting efforts he had
to make to force his wearied mind into redoubled literary exerti