of that elaborate libel on our great epic poet which goes by the name of Dr. Johnson’s Life of Milton.  Murray declared that it would be worth the copyright of Childe Harold to have Macaulay on the staff of the Quarterly.  The family breakfast table in Bloomsbury was covered with cards of invitation to dinner from every quarter of London, and his father groaned in spirit over the conviction that thenceforward the law would be less to him than ever.  A warm admirer of Robert Hall, Macaulay heard with pride how the great preacher, then wellnigh worn out with that long disease, his life, was discovered lying on the floor, employed in learning by aid of grammar and dictionary enough Italian to enable him to verify the parallel between Milton and Dante.  But the compliment that of all others came most nearly home,—­the only commendation of his literary talent which even in the innermost domestic circle he was ever known to repeat,—­was the sentence with which Jeffrey acknowledged the receipt of his manuscript:  “The more I think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that style.”

Macaulay’s outward man was never better described than in two sentences of Praed’s Introduction to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine.  “There came up a short manly figure, marvellously upright, with a bad neckcloth, and one hand in his waistcoat pocket. ["I well remember,” writes Sir William Stirling Maxwell, “the first time I met him,—­in 1845 or ’46, I think,—­at dinner at the house of his old friend, Sir John Macleod.  I did not know him by sight, and, when he came into the room with two or three other guests, I supposed that he was announced as General—­I forget what.  The party was large, and I was on the other side of the table, and a good way off, and I was very soon struck by the amazing number of subjects on which he seemed at home;—­politics, home and foreign,—­French literature, and Hebrew poetry;—­and I remember thinking, ’This is a General with a singularly well-stored mind and badly tied neckcloth.’  Till, at last, a remark on the prose of Dryden led me to conclude that it could be no one but the Great Essayist.”] Of regular beauty he had little to boast; but in faces where there is an expression of great power, or of great good humour, or both, you do not regret its absence.”  This picture, in which every touch is correct, tells all that there is to be told.  He had a massive head, and features of a powerful and rugged cast, but so constantly lit up by every joyful and ennobling emotion that it mattered little if, when absolutely quiescent, his face was rather homely than handsome.  While conversing at table no one thought him otherwise than good-looking; but, when he rose, he was seen to be short and stout in figure.  “At Holland House, the other day,” writes his sister Margaret in September 1831, “Tom met Lady Lyndhurst for the first time.  She said to him:  ’Mr. Macaulay, you are so different to what I expected.  I thought you were dark and thin, but you are fair, and really, Mr. Macaulay, you are fat."’ He at all times sat and stood straight, full, and square; and in this respect Woolner, in the fine statue at Cambridge, has missed what was undoubtedly the most marked fact in his personal appearance.