n milk-punch and roast turkey, drank
tea in floods at an hour when older men are intent upon anything rather
than on the means of keeping themselves awake, and made little of
sitting over the fire till the bell rang for morning chapel in order
to see a friend off by the early coach. In the license of the summer
vacation, after some prolonged and festive gathering, the whole party
would pour out into the moonlight, and ramble for mile after mile
through the country, till the noise of their wide-flowing talk mingled
with the twittering of the birds in the hedges which bordered the Coton
pathway or the Madingley road. On such occasions it must have been well
worth the loss of sleep to hear Macaulay plying Austin with sarcasms
upon the doctrine of the Greatest Happiness, which then had still some
gloss of novelty; putting into an ever-fresh shape the time-honoured
jokes against the Johnians for the benefit of the Villierses; and urging
an interminable debate on Wordsworth's merits as a poet, in which
the Coleridges, as in duty bound, were ever ready to engage. In this
particular field he acquired a skill of fence which rendered him the
most redoubtable of antagonists. Many years afterwards, at the time when
the Prelude was fresh from the press, he was maintaining against the
opinion of a large and mixed society that the poem was unreadable. At
last, overborne by the united indignation of so many of Wordsworth's
admirers, he agreed that the question should be referred to the test
of personal experience; and on inquiry it was discovered that the only
individual present who had got through the Prelude was Macaulay himself.

It is not only that the witnesses of these scenes unanimously declare
that they have never since heard such conversation in the most renowned
of social circles. The partiality of a generous young man for trusted
and admired companions may well colour his judgment over the space of
even half a century. But the estimate of university contemporaries
was abundantly confirmed by the outer world. While on a visit to Lord
Lansdowne at Bowood, years after they had left Cambridge, Austin and
Macaulay happened to get upon college topics one morning at breakfast.
When the meal was finished they drew their chairs to either end of the
chimney-piece, and talked at each other across the hearth-rug as if
they were in a first-floor room in the Old Court of Trinity. The whole
company, ladies, artists, politicians, and diners-