o are called his friends feel towards him, as they all
do, angry and sore at his overbearing, arrogant, and neglectful conduct,
when those reactions in public feeling, which must come, arrive, he will
have nothing to return upon, no place of refuge, no hand of such tried
friends as Fox and Canning had to support him. You will see that he will
soon place himself in a false position before the public. His popularity
will go down, and he will find himself alone. Mr. Pitt, it is true, did
not study to strengthen himself by friendships but this was not from
jealousy. I do not love the man, but I believe he was quite superior to
that. It was from a solitary pride he had. I heard at Holland House the
other day that Sir Philip Francis said that, though he hated Pitt, he
must confess there was something fine in seeing how he maintained his
post by himself. "The lion walks alone," he said. "The jackals herd
together."'"

This conversation, to those who have heard Macaulay talk, bears
unmistakable signs of having been committed to paper while the
words,--or, at any rate, the outlines,--of some of the most important
sentences were fresh in his sister's mind. Nature had predestined the
two men to mutual antipathy. Macaulay, who knew his own range and kept
within it, and who gave the world nothing except his best and most
finished work, was fretted by the slovenly omniscience of Brougham, who
affected to be a walking encyclopaedia, "a kind of semi-Solomon, half
knowing everything from the cedar to the hyssop." [These words are
extracted from a letter written by Macaulay.] The student, who, in his
later years, never left his library for the House of Commons without
regret, had little in common with one who, like Napoleon, held that a
great reputation was a great noise; who could not change horses without
making a speech, see the Tories come in without offering to take a
judgeship, or allow the French to make a Revolution without proposing to
naturalise himself as a citizen of the new Republic. The statesman who
never deserted an ally, or distrusted a friend, could have no fellowship
with a free-lance, ignorant of the very meaning of loyalty; who, if
the surfeited pen of the reporter had not declined its task, would have
enriched our collections of British oratory by at least one Philippic
against every colleague with whom he had ever acted. The many who read
this conversation by the light of the public history of Lord Melbourne's
Admi