nd Bacon
on the dais of the hall; again to ramble by moonlight round Neville's
cloister, discoursing the picturesque but somewhat exoteric philosophy
which it pleased him to call by the name of metaphysics. From the door
of his rooms, along the wall of the Chapel, there runs a flagged pathway
which affords an acceptable relief from the rugged pebbles that surround
it. Here as a Bachelor of Arts he would walk, book in hand, morning
after morning throughout the long vacation, reading with the same
eagerness and the same rapidity whether the volume was the most abstruse
of treatises, the loftiest of poems, or the flimsiest of novels. That
was the spot where in his failing years he specially loved to renew
the feelings of the past; and some there are who can never revisit it
without the fancy that there, if anywhere, his dear shade must linger.

He was fortunate in his contemporaries. Among his intimate friends were
the two Coleridges--Derwent, the son, and Henry Nelson, who was destined
to be the son-in-law of the poet; and how exceptional that destiny was
the readers of Sara Coleridge's letters are now aware. Hyde Villiers,
whom an untimely death alone prevented from taking an equal place in
a trio of distinguished brothers, was of his year, though not of his
college. [Lord Clarendon, and his brothers, were all Johnians.] In the
year below were the young men who now bear the titles of Lord Grey, Lord
Belper, and Lord Romilly; [This paragraph was written in the summer of
1874. Three of Macaulay's old college friends, Lord Romilly, Moultrie,
and Charles Austin, died, in the hard winter that followed, within a few
days of each other.] and after the same interval came Moultrie, who in
his "Dream of Life," with a fidelity which he himself pronounced to have
been obtained at some sacrifice of grace, has told us how the heroes of
his time looked and lived, and Charles Villiers, who still delights our
generation by showing us how they talked. Then there was Praed, fresh
from editing the Etonian, as a product of collective boyish effort
unique in its literary excellence and variety; and Sidney Walker,
Praed's gifted school fellow, whose promise was blighted by premature
decay of powers; and Charles Austin, whose fame would now be more in
proportion to his extraordinary abilities, had not his unparalleled
success as an advocate tempted him before his day to retire from the
toils of a career of whose rewards he already had enough.