There was some conversation about Nollekens the sculptor, whose inordinate love of money was such a curious blemish in his character.  Macaulay told one or two stories illustrating his parsimony.  Then he came to speak of art in general, and said he did not think the faculty for it a high gift of mind.  This opinion was strongly combated by Mr. Blore the architect and others, but I remember Macaulay gave, as in some sort an illustration of his theory, a story of Grant the portrait-painter, then of chief eminence in London.  Cornewall Lewis was to sit to him, and Grant, knowing he had written books, desired to get at least a smattering of them before the sittings began.  But some one, perhaps mischievously, told him Lewis was the author of The Monk, and this book he accordingly read.  He took an early opportunity to refer to it to his sitter, who to his no small discomfiture disclaimed it.  As conclusive proof of the truth of this denial, Lewis stated further that the book was written before he was born.  Everybody was amused that Cornewall Lewis, so famous for abstruse learning, should have deemed it necessary to appeal thus to dates to show he was not the author of a novel.

Macaulay persisted in his theory that artistic power was not an intellectual faculty, but I could not quite determine whether he was not putting it forth as mere paradox.  One could fancy the paroxysm of rage into which Haydon would have been thrown had such a theory been advanced in his presence; or Fuseli, who, as Haydon reports, exclaimed, on first seeing the Elgin Marbles, with his strange accent, “Those Greeks, they were godes.”  But the thought of Michel Angelo and of Lionardo was a sufficient answer to the theory.

Macaulay, in further support of his general proposition, maintained that a man might be a great musical composer and yet not in the true sense a man of genius.  He instanced Mozart, who, he said, was not claimed to have been of high intellectual ability.  Mr. Herbert Coleridge said he thought this a mistake, but he urged that full details were wanting in regard to his mental capacity as shown in other ways than in music.  Macaulay replied that Mozart was the Raphael of music, and was both a composer and a wonderful performer at the age of six.  “Now,” said he, “we cannot conceive of any one being a great poet at the age of six:  we hear nothing of Shakespeare or Milton at the age of six.”

The conversation turned to Homer and the question whether the Homeric poems were the product of one mind.  Macaulay maintained they were.  It was inconceivable, he said, that there could have been at the Homeric period five or six poets equal to the production of the 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