wide-flowing talk mingled with the twittering of the birds in the hedges which bordered the Coton pathway or the Madingley road.  On such occasions it must have been well worth the loss of sleep to hear Macaulay plying Austin with sarcasms upon the doctrine of the Greatest Happiness, which then had still some gloss of novelty; putting into an ever-fresh shape the time-honoured jokes against the Johnians for the benefit of the Villierses; and urging an interminable debate on Wordsworth’s merits as a poet, in which the Coleridges, as in duty bound, were ever ready to engage.  In this particular field he acquired a skill of fence which rendered him the most redoubtable of antagonists.  Many years afterwards, at the time when the Prelude was fresh from the press, he was maintaining against the opinion of a large and mixed society that the poem was unreadable.  At last, overborne by the united indignation of so many of Wordsworth’s admirers, he agreed that the question should be referred to the test of personal experience; and on inquiry it was discovered that the only individual present who had got through the Prelude was Macaulay himself.

It is not only that the witnesses of these scenes unanimously declare that they have never since heard such conversation in the most renowned of social circles.  The partiality of a generous young man for trusted and admired companions may well colour his judgment over the space of even half a century.  But the estimate of university contemporaries was abundantly confirmed by the outer world.  While on a visit to Lord Lansdowne at Bowood, years after they had left Cambridge, Austin and Macaulay happened to get upon college topics one morning at breakfast.  When the meal was finished they drew their chairs to either end of the chimney-piece, and talked at each other across the hearth-rug as if they were in a first-floor room in the Old Court of Trinity.  The whole company, ladies, artists, politicians, and diners-out, formed a silent circle round the two Cantabs, and, with a short break for lunch, never stirred till the bell warned them that it was time to dress for dinner.

It has all irrevocably perished.  With life before them, and each intent on his own future, none among that troop of friends had the mind to play Boswell to the others.  One repartee survives, thrown off in the heat of discussion, but exquisitely perfect in all its parts.  Acknowledged without dissent to be the best applied quotation that ever was made within five miles of the Fitzwilliam Museum, it is unfortunately too strictly classical for reproduction in these pages.