emembered. He could repeat pages of the very
dreariest stuff that ever was written, and was in danger of doing so on
small provocation,--an infliction it must have been hard for his friends
to have endured sometimes. Great stories are told of his remarkable
memory,--one seldom equalled by any man. He was always willing to accept
a friendly challenge to a feat of memory. One day in the board-room of
the British Museum he handed to Lord Aberdeen a sheet of foolscap
covered with writing arranged in parallel columns down each of the four
pages. This document, on which the ink was still wet, proved to be a
full list of the Senior Wranglers at Cambridge, with their dates and
colleges for the hundred years during which the names of Senior
Wranglers had been recorded in the University Calendar. On another
occasion Sir David Dundas asked:--

"'Macaulay, do you know your Popes?' 'No,' was the answer; 'I
always get wrong among the Innocents.' 'But you can say your
Archbishops of Canterbury?' 'Any fool,' said Macaulay, 'could say
his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards;' and he went off at a
score, drawing breath only once in order to remark on some oddity."

He was easily bored in general society, and in later life rarely went
beyond his little circle of intimates. Children were the only people of
whom he never tired, and he was a royal companion to them always. He was
unrivalled in the invention of games, and never wearied of repeating
them. He had an inexhaustible repertory of small dramas for his nieces,
and sustained a great variety of parts with much skill. An old friend of
the family writes:--

"There was one never-failing game of building up a den with
newspapers behind the sofa, and of enacting robbers and tigers; we
shrieking with terror, but always begging him to begin again, of
which we never grew weary."

He writes to a friend concerning Dickens, that he did not think it
possible for fiction to affect him as the death of little Nell had done,
and adds:--

"Have you seen the first number of 'Dombey'? There is not much in
it, but there is one passage which made me cry as if my heart would
break. It is the description of a little girl who has just lost her
mother, and is unkindly treated by everybody. Images of that kind
always overpower me even when the artist is less skilful than
Dickens."

In truth, his extreme sensibility was often a gre