There is an allusion to it in a squib of Praed’s, very finished and elegant, and beyond all doubt contemporary.  The passage relating to Macaulay begins with the lines—­“Then the favourite comes with his trumpets and drums, And his arms and his metaphors crossed.”] You may find the cause in the same three words:  the Good Old King.”  Praed, on the other hand, would allow his late monarch neither public merits nor private virtues.  “A good man!  If he had been a plain country gentleman with no wider opportunities for mischief, he would at least have bullied his footmen and cheated his steward.”

Macaulay’s intense enjoyment of all that was stirring and vivid around him undoubtedly hindered him in the race for university honours; though his success was sufficient to inspirit him at the time, and to give him abiding pleasure in the retrospect.  He twice gained the Chancellor’s medal for English verse, with poems admirably planned, and containing passages of real beauty, but which may not be republished in the teeth of the panegyric which, within ten years after they were written, he pronounced upon Sir Roger Newdigate.  Sir Roger had laid down the rule that no exercise sent in for the prize which he established at Oxford was to exceed fifty lines.  This law, says Macaulay, seems to have more foundation in reason than is generally the case with a literary canon, “for the world, we believe, is pretty well agreed in thinking that the shorter a prize poem is, the better.”

Trinity men find it difficult to understand how it was that he missed getting one of the three silver goblets given for the best English Declamations of the year.  If there is one thing which all Macaulay’s friends, and all his enemies, admit, it is that he could declaim English.  His own version of the affair was that the Senior Dean, a relative of the victorious candidate, sent for him and said:  “Mr. Macaulay, as you have not got the first cup, I do not suppose that you will care for either of the others.”  He was consoled, however, by the prize for Latin Declamation; and in 1821 he established his classical repute by winning a Craven University scholarship in company with his friend Malden, and Mr. George Long, who preceded Malden as Professor of Greek at University College, London.

Macaulay detested the labour of manufacturing Greek and Latin verse in cold blood as an exercise; and his Hexameters were never up to the best Etonian mark, nor his Iambics to the highest standard of Shrewsbury.  He defined a scholar as one who reads Plato with his feet on the fender.  When already well on in his third year he writes:  “I never practised composition a single hour since I have been at Cambridge.”  “Soak your mind with Cicero,” was his constant advice to students at that time of life when writing Latin prose is the most lucrative of accomplishments.  The advantage of this precept was proved in the Fellowship examination of the year 1824, when he obtained the