Of all his places of sojourn during his joyous and shining pilgrimage through the world, Trinity, and Trinity alone, had any share with his home in Macaulay’s affection and loyalty.  To the last he regarded it as an ancient Greek, or a mediaeval Italian, felt towards his native city.  As long as he had place and standing there, he never left it willingly or returned to it without delight.  The only step in his course about the wisdom of which he sometimes expressed misgiving was his preference of a London to a Cambridge life.  The only dignity that in his later days he was known to covet was an honorary fellowship, which would have allowed him again to look through his window upon the college grass-plots, and to sleep within sound of the splashing of the fountain; again to breakfast on commons, and dine beneath the portraits of Newton and Bacon on the dais of the hall; again to ramble by moonlight round Neville’s cloister, discoursing the picturesque but somewhat exoteric philosophy which it pleased him to call by the name of metaphysics.  From the door of his rooms, along the wall of the Chapel, there runs a flagged pathway which affords an acceptable relief from the rugged pebbles that surround it.  Here as a Bachelor of Arts he would walk, book in hand, morning after morning throughout the long vacation, reading with the same eagerness and the same rapidity whether the volume was the most abstruse of treatises, the loftiest of poems, or the flimsiest of novels.  That was the spot where in his failing years he specially loved to renew the feelings of the past; and some there are who can never revisit it without the fancy that there, if anywhere, his dear shade must linger.

He was fortunate in his contemporaries.  Among his intimate friends were the two Coleridges—­Derwent, the son, and Henry Nelson, who was destined to be the son-in-law of the poet; and how exceptional that destiny was the readers of Sara Coleridge’s letters are now aware.  Hyde Villiers, whom an untimely death alone prevented from taking an equal place in a trio of distinguished brothers, was of his year, though not of his college. [Lord Clarendon, and his brothers, were all Johnians.] In the year below were the young men who now bear the titles of Lord Grey, Lord Belper, and Lord Romilly; [This paragraph was written in the summer of 1874.  Three of Macaulay’s old college friends, Lord Romilly, Moultrie, and Charles Austin, died, in the hard winter that followed, within a few days of each other.] and after the same interval came Moultrie, who in his “Dream of Life,” with a fidelity which he himself pronounced to have been obtained at some sacrifice of grace, has told us how the heroes of his time looked and lived, and Charles Villiers, who still delights our generation by showing us how they talked.  Then there was Praed, fresh from editing the Etonian, as a product of collective boyish effort unique in its literary excellence and variety; and Sidney Walker, Praed’s gifted school fellow, whose promise was blighted by premature decay of powers; and Charles Austin, whose fame would now be more in proportion to his extraordinary abilities, had not his unparalleled success as an advocate tempted him before his day to retire from the toils of a career of whose rewards he already had enough.