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 before, and paid immediately after, the Easter
vacation. On putting the volume into Jeffrey's hand, your uncle said,
'I don't think you will find me tripping again. I knew it, I thought,
pretty well before; but I am sure I know it now.' Jeffrey proceeded to
examine him, putting him on at a variety of the heaviest passages--the
battle of the angels--the dialogues of Adam and the archangels,--and
found him ready to declaim them all, till he begged him to stop. He
asked him how he had acquired such a command of the poem, and had for
answer: 'I had him in the country, and I read it twice over, and I
don't think that I shall ever forget it again.' At the same time he told
Jeffrey that he believed he could repeat everything of his own he had
ever printed, and nearly all he had ever written, 'except, perhaps, some
of my college exercises.'

"I myself had an opportunity of seeing and hearing a remarkable proof of
your uncle's hold upon the most insignificant verbiage that chance had
poured into his ear. I was staying with him at Bowood, in the winter
of 1852. Lord Elphinstone--who had been many years before Governor of
Madras,--was telling one morning at breakfast of a certain native barber
there, who was famous, in his time, for English doggrel of his own
making, with which he was wont to regale his customers. 'Of course,'
said Lord Elphinstone, 'I don't remember any of it; but was very funny,
and used to be repeated in society.' Macaulay, who was sitting a good
way off, immediately said: 'I remember being shaved by the fellow, and
he recited a quantity of verse to me during the operation, and here
is some of it;' and then he went off in a very queer doggrel about the
exploits of Bonaparte, of which I recollect the recurring refrain--

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

It is hard