in age and classical attainments, and at the university maintained a rivalry so generous as hardly to deserve the name.  Each of the pupils had his own chamber, which the others were forbidden to enter under the penalty of a shilling fine.  This prohibition was in general not very strictly observed; but the tutor had taken the precaution of placing Macaulay in a room next his own;—­a proximity which rendered the position of an intruder so exceptionally dangerous that even Malden could not remember having once passed his friend’s threshold during the whole of their stay at Aspenden.

In this seclusion, removed from the delight of family intercourse, (the only attraction strong enough to draw him from his books,) the boy read widely, unceasingly, more than rapidly.  The secret of his immense acquirements lay in two invaluable gifts of nature,—­an unerring memory, and the capacity for taking in at a glance the contents of a printed page.  During the first part of his life he remembered whatever caught his fancy without going through the process of consciously getting it by heart.  As a child, during one of the numerous seasons when the social duties devolved upon Mr. Macaulay, he accompanied his father on an afternoon call, and found on a table the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which he had never before met with.  He kept himself quiet with his prize while the elders were talking, and, on his return home, sat down upon his mother’s bed, and repeated to her as many cantos as she had the patience or the strength to listen to.  At one period of his life he was known to say that, if by some miracle of Vandalism all copies of Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim’s Progress were destroyed off the face of the earth, he would undertake to reproduce them both from recollection whenever a revival of learning came.  In 1813, while waiting in a Cambridge coffee-room for a postchaise which was to take him to his school, he picked up a county newspaper containing two such specimens of provincial poetical talent as in those days might be read in the corner of any weekly journal.  One piece was headed “Reflections of an Exile;” while the other was a trumpery parody on the Welsh ballad “Ar hyd y nos,” referring to some local anecdote of an ostler whose nose had been bitten off by a filly.  He looked them once through, and never gave them a thought for forty years, at the end of which time he repeated them both without missing,—­or, as far as he knew, changing,—­a single word.

[Sir William Stirling Maxwell says, in a letter with which he has honoured me:  “Of his extraordinary memory I remember Lord Jeffrey telling me an instance.  They had had a difference about a quotation from Paradise Lost, and made a wager about it; the wager being a copy of the hook, which, on reference to the passage, it was found Jeffrey had won.  The bet was made just before, and paid immediately after, the Easter vacation.  On putting the volume into Jeffrey’s hand, your uncle said, ’I don’t think