But when he saw the British boys,
He up and ran away.

It is hardly conceivable that he had ever had occasion to recall
that poem since the day when he escaped from under the poet's
razor.]

As he grew older, this wonderful power became impaired so far
that getting by rote the compositions of others was no longer an
involuntary process. He has noted in his Lucan the several
occasions on which he committed to memory his favourite passages
of an author whom he regarded as unrivalled among rhetoricians;
and the dates refer to 1836, when he had just turned the middle
point of life. During his last years, at his dressing-table in
the morning, he would learn by heart one or another of the little
idylls in which Martial expatiates on the enjoyments of a Spanish
country-house, or a villa-farm in the environs of Rome;--those
delicious morsels of verse which, (considering the sense that
modern ideas attach to the name,) it is an injustice to class
under the head of epigrams.

Macaulay's extraordinary faculty of assimilating printed matter
at first sight remained the same through life. To the end he read
books more quickly than other people skimmed them, and skimmed
them as fast as anyone else could turn the leaves. "He seemed to
read through the skin," said one who had often watched the
operation. And this speed was not in his case obtained at the
expense of accuracy. Anything which had once appeared in type,
from the highest effort of genius down to the most detestable