between these.  Could it be supposed that at the very dawn of history there was a group, as it were, of men each in the highest degree gifted with “the vision and the faculty divine”?  Then as to the Iliad and Odyssey being both the production of Homer:  if we admitted one to be, that the other was would follow as a matter of course.  It was the old test of Paley over again—­the finding the watch, and the presumption from it of a maker; and in this case there was the watchmaker’s shop close by.  He urged, too, that Homer was the only great poet who did not in narrating past events use the present tense—­speak of them as if happening at the moment.  He quoted long passages from Paradise Lost to show how Milton would fall into the present tense, though he might have begun in the past.  The fact that throughout the many thousand lines of Homer no instance of the sort could be found seemed to make it clear that but one mind produced them.  It was very interesting to hear Macaulay recite Milton, for whom he had such passionate admiration.  He made quotations also from Burns and from old ballads in illustration of some theory which I do not recall, but showing his wonderful memory.  He had, indeed, an altogether marvelous facility in producing passages as he might need them for whatever subject he was discussing.  Greville, writing of him in 1836, says that he displayed feats of memory unequaled by any other human being, and that he could repeat all Milton and all Demosthenes and a great part of the Bible.  “But his great forte,” Greville adds, “is history, especially English history.  Here his superhuman memory, which appears to have the faculty of digesting and arranging, as well as of retaining, has converted his mind into a mighty magazine of knowledge, from which, with the precision and correctness of a kind of intellectual machine, he pours forth stores of learning, information, precept, example, anecdote and illustration with a familiarity and facility not less astonishing than delightful.”

Our evening was all too short.  The talk had never flagged, and so the time had gone quickly by.  I may note that in the discussions about Homer, Mr. Herbert Coleridge had shown the utmost familiarity with the subject, making him seem in this respect quite on a level with Macaulay.

The time came for us to join the ladies in the drawing-room, but Macaulay’s carriage was announced, and he declined going up stairs again, saying that his shortness of breath warned him it was dangerous to do so.  This symptom was doubtless due to that affection of the heart which two years and a half later ended his life.  As I have said, he was beginning to give up dining out on account of his failing health.  But his delight was as great as ever in the society of his near friends among men of letters, and these he continued to gather at the breakfasts he had long been in the habit of giving—­Dean Milman, Lord Stanhope, the bishop of St. Davids (Thirlwall),