ise, and its very faults
pleased. The redundance of youthful enthusiasm, which he himself
unsparingly condemns in the preface to his collected essays, seemed
graceful enough in the eyes of others, if it were only as a relief from
the perverted ability of that elaborate libel on our great epic poet
which goes by the name of Dr. Johnson's Life of Milton. Murray declared
that it would be worth the copyright of Childe Harold to have Macaulay
on the staff of the Quarterly. The family breakfast table in Bloomsbury
was covered with cards of invitation to dinner from every quarter
of London, and his father groaned in spirit over the conviction that
thenceforward the law would be less to him than ever. A warm admirer
of Robert Hall, Macaulay heard with pride how the great preacher, then
wellnigh worn out with that long disease, his life, was discovered lying
on the floor, employed in learning by aid of grammar and dictionary
enough Italian to enable him to verify the parallel between Milton and
Dante. But the compliment that of all others came most nearly home,--the
only commendation of his literary talent which even in the innermost
domestic circle he was ever known to repeat,--was the sentence with
which Jeffrey acknowledged the receipt of his manuscript: "The more I
think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that style."

Macaulay's outward man was never better described than in two sentences
of Praed's Introduction to Knight's Quarterly Magazine. "There came up a
short manly figure, marvellously upright, with a bad neckcloth, and one
hand in his waistcoat pocket. ["I well remember," writes Sir William
Stirling Maxwell, "the first time I met him,--in 1845 or '46, I
think,--at dinner at the house of his old friend, Sir John Macleod. I
did not know him by sight, and, when he came into the room with two
or three other guests, I supposed that he was announced as General--I
forget what. The party was large, and I was on the other side of the
table, and a good way off, and I was very soon struck by the amazing
number of subjects on which he seemed at home;--politics, home and
foreign,--French literature, and Hebrew poetry;--and I remember
thinking, 'This is a General with a singularly well-stored mind and
badly tied neckcloth.' Till, at last, a remark on the prose of Dryden
led me to conclude that it could be no one but the Great Essayist."] Of
regular beauty he had little to boast; but in faces where there is an
expression