you will find me tripping again.  I knew it, I thought, pretty well before; but I am sure I know it now.’  Jeffrey proceeded to examine him, putting him on at a variety of the heaviest passages—­the battle of the angels—­the dialogues of Adam and the archangels,—­and found him ready to declaim them all, till he begged him to stop.  He asked him how he had acquired such a command of the poem, and had for answer:  ’I had him in the country, and I read it twice over, and I don’t think that I shall ever forget it again.’  At the same time he told Jeffrey that he believed he could repeat everything of his own he had ever printed, and nearly all he had ever written, ’except, perhaps, some of my college exercises.’

“I myself had an opportunity of seeing and hearing a remarkable proof of your uncle’s hold upon the most insignificant verbiage that chance had poured into his ear.  I was staying with him at Bowood, in the winter of 1852.  Lord Elphinstone—­who had been many years before Governor of Madras,—­was telling one morning at breakfast of a certain native barber there, who was famous, in his time, for English doggrel of his own making, with which he was wont to regale his customers.  ‘Of course,’ said Lord Elphinstone, ’I don’t remember any of it; but was very funny, and used to be repeated in society.’  Macaulay, who was sitting a good way off, immediately said:  ’I remember being shaved by the fellow, and he recited a quantity of verse to me during the operation, and here is some of it;’ and then he went off in a very queer doggrel about the exploits of Bonaparte, of which I recollect the recurring refrain—­

 But when he saw the British boys,
 He up and ran away.

It is hardly conceivable that he had ever had occasion to recall that poem since the day when he escaped from under the poet’s razor.]

As he grew older, this wonderful power became impaired so far that getting by rote the compositions of others was no longer an involuntary process.  He has noted in his Lucan the several occasions on which he committed to memory his favourite passages of an author whom he regarded as unrivalled among rhetoricians; and the dates refer to 1836, when he had just turned the middle point of life.  During his last years, at his dressing-table in the morning, he would learn by heart one or another of the little idylls in which Martial expatiates on the enjoyments of a Spanish country-house, or a villa-farm in the environs of Rome;—­those delicious morsels of verse which, (considering the sense that modern ideas attach to the name,) it is an injustice to class under the head of epigrams.

Macaulay’s extraordinary faculty of assimilating printed matter at first sight remained the same through life.  To the end he read books more quickly than other people skimmed them, and skimmed them as fast as anyone else could turn the leaves.  “He seemed to read through the skin,” said one who had often watched the operation.  And this speed was not in his case obtained at the expense of accuracy.  Anything which had once appeared in type, from the highest effort of genius down to the most detestable trash that ever consumed ink and paper manufactured for better things, had in his eyes an authority which led him to look upon misquotation as a species of minor sacrilege.