going through the process of consciously getting it by heart. As a
child, during one of the numerous seasons when the social duties
devolved upon Mr. Macaulay, he accompanied his father on an
afternoon call, and found on a table the Lay of the Last
Minstrel, which he had never before met with. He kept himself
quiet with his prize while the elders were talking, and, on his
return home, sat down upon his mother's bed, and repeated to her
as many cantos as she had the patience or the strength to listen
to. At one period of his life he was known to say that, if by
some miracle of Vandalism all copies of Paradise Lost and the
Pilgrim's Progress were destroyed off the face of the earth, he
would undertake to reproduce them both from recollection whenever
a revival of learning came. In 1813, while waiting in a Cambridge
coffee-room for a postchaise which was to take him to his school,
he picked up a county newspaper containing two such specimens of
provincial poetical talent as in those days might be read in the
corner of any weekly journal. One piece was headed "Reflections
of an Exile;" while the other was a trumpery parody on the Welsh
ballad "Ar hyd y nos," referring to some local anecdote of an
ostler whose nose had been bitten off by a filly. He looked them
once through, and never gave them a thought for forty years, at
the end of which time he repeated them both without missing,--or,
as far as he knew, changing,--a single word.

[Sir William Stirling Maxwell says, in a letter with which he has
honoured me: "Of his extraordinary memory I remember Lord Jeffrey
telling me an instance. They had had a difference about a
quotation from Paradise Lost, and made a wager about it; the
wager being a copy of the hook, which, on reference to the
passage, it was found Jeffrey had won. The bet was made just