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.