ly 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 trash that ever consumed ink and paper manufactured for
better things, had in his eyes an authority which led him to look upon
misquotation as a species of minor sacrilege.

With these endowments, sharpened by an insatiable curiosity, from his
fourteenth year onward he was permitted to roam almost at will over
the whole expanse of literature. He composed little beyond his school
exercises, which themselves bear signs of having been written in a
perfunctory manner. At this period he had evidently no heart in anything
but his reading. Before leaving Shelford for Aspenden he had already
invoked the epic muse for the last time.

"Arms and the man I sing, who strove in vain
To save green Erin from a foreign reign."

The man was Roderic, king of Connaught, whom he got tired of singing
before he had well completed two books of the poem. Thenceforward he
appears never to have struck his lyre, except in the first enthusiasm
aroused by the intelligence of some favourable turn of fortune on
the Continent. The flight of Napoleon fr