He dressed badly, but not cheaply.  His clothes, though ill put on, were good, and his wardrobe was always enormously overstocked.  Later in life he indulged himself in an apparently inexhaustible succession of handsome embroidered waistcoats, which he used to regard with much complacency.  He was unhandy to a degree quite unexampled in the experience of all who knew him.  When in the open air he wore perfectly new dark kid gloves, into the fingers of which he never succeeded in inserting his own more than half way.  After be had sailed for India there were found in his chambers between fifty and sixty strops, hacked into strips and splinters, and razors without beginning or end.  About the same period he hurt his hand, and was reduced to send for a barber.  After the operation, he asked what was to pay.  “Oh, Sir,” said the man, “whatever you usually give the person who shaves you.”  “In that case,” said Macaulay, “I should give you a great gash on each cheek.”

During an epoch when, at our principal seats of education, athletic pursuits are regarded as a leading object of existence rather than as a means of health and recreation, it requires some boldness to confess that Macaulay was utterly destitute of bodily accomplishments, and that he viewed his deficiencies with supreme indifference.  He could neither swim, nor row, nor drive, nor skate, nor shoot.  He seldom crossed a saddle, and never willingly.  When in attendance at Windsor as a cabinet minister he was informed that a horse was at his disposal.  “If her Majesty wishes to see me ride,” he said, “she must order out an elephant.”  The only exercise in which he can be said to have excelled was that of threading crowded streets with his eyes fixed upon a book.  He might be seen in such thoroughfares as Oxford Street, and Cheapside, walking as fast as other people walked, and reading a great deal faster than anybody else could read.  As a pedestrian he was, indeed, above the average.  Till he had passed fifty he thought nothing of going on foot from the Albany to Clapham, and from Clapham on to Greenwich; and, while still in the prime of life, he was for ever on his feet indoors as well as out.  “In those days,” says his cousin Mrs. Conybeare, “he walked rapidly up and down a room as he talked.  I remember on one occasion, when he was making a call, he stopped short in his walk in the midst of a declamation on some subject, and said, ‘You have a brick floor here.’  The hostess confessed that it was true, though she hoped that it had been disguised by double matting and a thick carpet.  He said that his habit of always walking enabled him to tell accurately the material he was treading on.”

His faults were such as give annoyance to those who dislike a man rather than anxiety to those who love him.  Vehemence, over-confidence, the inability to recognise that there are two sides to a question or two people in a dialogue, are defects which during youth are perhaps inseparable from gifts like those with which he was endowed.  Moultrie, speaking of his undergraduate days, tells us that