In the early days of Queen Victoria’s reign--when Sir Robert Peel was winning his way to the proud position he later held--when American and English politicians were getting into the toils of the “Maine Boundary” dispute (afterward settled by Ashburton and Webster), and when the Countess of Blessington was making “Gore House” lively with her little suppers, and the banker Rogers entertaining all _beaux esprits_ at his home near the Green Park, there may have been found as guest at one of the banker’s famous breakfasts--somewhere we will say in the year 1838--a man, well-preserved, still under forty--with a shaggy brow, with clothes very likely ill-adjusted and ill-fitting, and with gloves which are never buttoned--who has just come back from India, where he has held lucrative official position. He is cogitating, it is said, a history of England, and his talk has a fulness and richness that seem inexhaustible. You know to whom I must refer--Thomas Babington Macaulay[84]--not a new man at Rogers’s table, not a new man to bookish people; for he had won his honors in literature, especially by a first paper on Milton, published in the year 1825 in the _Edinburgh Review_. This bore a new stamp and had qualities that could not be overlooked. There are scores of us who read that paper for the first time in the impressionable days of youth, who are carried back now by the mere mention of it to the times of the old Puritan poet. “We can almost fancy that we are visiting him in his small lodging; that we see him sitting at the old organ beneath the faded green hangings; that we can catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to find the day; that we are reading in the lines of his noble countenance the proud and mournful history of his glory and his affliction!” Macaulay came of good old Scotch stock--his forefathers counting up patriarchal families in Coll and Inverary; but his father, Zachary Macaulay, well known for his anti-slavery action and influence, and for his association with Wilberforce, married an English Quaker girl from Bristol--said to have been a _protégée_ of our old friend, Mistress Hannah More. Of this marriage was born, in 1800, at the charming country house of an aunt, named Babington, in the pleasant county of Leicestershire, the future historian.