Greville of his first meeting with Macaulay in the early February of 1833, while the struggle over Lord Russell's third Reform Bill was still going on. "Dined yesterday," says Greville, "with Lord Holland; came very late and found a vacant place between Sir George Robinson and a common-looking man in black. As soon as I had time to look at my neighbor, I began to speculate, as one usually does, as to who he might be, and as he did not for some time open his lips except to eat, I settled that he was some obscure man of letters, or of medicine, perhaps a cholera doctor. In a short time the conversation turned on early and late education, and Lord Holland said he had always remarked that self-educated men were peculiarly conceited and arrogant, and apt to look down on the generality of mankind from their being ignorant of how much other people knew; not having been at public schools, they are uninformed of the course of general education. My neighbor observed that he thought the most remarkable example of self-education that of Alfieri, who had reached the age of thirty without having acquired any accomplishment save that of driving, and who was so ignorant of his own language that he had to learn it like a child, beginning with elementary books. Lord Holland quoted Julius Caesar and Scaliger as examples of late education, said that the latter had been wounded, and that he had been married and commenced learning Greek the same day, when my neighbor remarked 'that he supposed his learning Greek was not an instantaneous act like his marriage.' This remark and the manner of it gave me the notion that he was a dull fellow, for it came out in a {186} way which bordered on the ridiculous so as to excite something like a sneer. I was a little surprised to hear him continue the thread of conversation, from Scaliger's wound, and talk of Loyola having been wounded at Pampeluna. I wondered how he happened to know anything about Loyola's wound. Having thus settled my opinion I went on eating my dinner, when Auckland, who was sitting opposite to me, addressed my neighbor: 'Mr. Macaulay, will you drink a glass of wine?' I thought I should have dropped off my chair. It was Macaulay, the man I had been so long most curious to see and to hear, whose genius, eloquence, astonishing knowledge, and diversified talents have excited my wonder and admiration for such a length of time, and here I had been sitting next to him, hearing him talk, and setting him down for a dull fellow." We are here only at the opening of Macaulay's great career. Even at this time the world seemed to have made up its mind that Macaulay had a great career before him. At the present day, when more than forty years have passed over his tomb in Westminster Abbey, it is a question still keenly contested every now and then, whether Macaulay fully realized or barely failed to realize the expectations which men were forming of him on that day when Charles Greville met him for the first