point of view in that walk was a slight acclivity, whence the traveller from Leicester catches his first sight of Rothley Temple, with its background of hill and greenwood.  He is remembered as sitting at the window in the hall, reading Dante to himself, or translating it aloud as long as any listener cared to remain within ear-shot.  He occupied, by choice, a very small chamber on the ground floor, through the window of which he could escape unobserved while afternoon callers were on their way between the front door and the drawing-room.  On such occasions he would take refuge in a boat moored under the shade of some fine oaks which still exist, though the ornamental water on whose bank they stood has since been converted into dry land.

A journal kept at intervals by Margaret Macaulay, some extracts from which have here been arranged in the form of a continuous narrative, affords a pleasant and faithful picture of her brother’s home-life during the years 1831 and 1832.  With an artless candour, from which his reputation will not suffer, she relates the alternations of hope and disappointment through which the young people passed when it began to be a question whether or not he would be asked to join the Administration.

“I think I was about twelve when I first became very fond of my brother, and from that time my affection for him has gone on increasing during a period of seven years.  I shall never forget my delight and enchantment when I first found that he seemed to like talking to me.  His manner was very flattering to such a child, for he always took as much pains to amuse me, and to inform me on anything I wished to know, as ho could have done to the greatest person in the land.  I have heard him express great disgust towards those people who, lively and agreeable abroad, are a dead weight in the family circle.  I think the remarkable clearness of his style proceeds in some measure from the habit of conversing with very young people, to whom he has a great deal to explain and impart.

“He reads his works to us in the manuscript, and, when we find fault, as I very often do with his being too severe upon people, he takes it with the greatest kindness, and often alters what we do not like.  I hardly ever, indeed, met with a sweeter temper than his.  He is rather hasty, and when he has not time for an instant’s thought, he will sometimes return a quick answer, for which he will be sorry the moment he has said it.  But in a conversation of any length, though it may be on subjects that touch him very nearly, and though the person with whom he converses may be very provoking and extremely out of temper, I never saw him lose his.  He never uses this superiority, as some do, for the purpose of irritating another still more by coolness; but speaks in a kind, good-natured manner, as if he wished to bring the other back to temper without appearing to notice that he had lost it.

“He at one time took a very punning turn, and we laid a wager in books, my Mysteries of Udolpho against his German Theatre, that he could not make two hundred puns in one evening.  He did it, however, in two hours, and, although they were of course most of them miserably bad, yet it was a proof of great quickness.