It was in June, 1857, that I had the good fortune to meet Macaulay at dinner at the house of my dear friend, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, then principal of St. Mark's College, Chelsea. The brilliant career of the great talker and essayist was drawing to its close, and it is partly on this account that I make now what record I can of my single meeting with him. He was beginning to give up society, so that only at the houses of his oldest friends was there any chance of seeing him. Besides the especial attraction of Macaulay's presence it was an interesting company that was gathered that evening around my friend's hospitable board. One felt that the English dinner, that choicest of all opportunities for exchange of thought, was here to be enjoyed in high perfection. Among the guests were Mr. Blore, an elderly gentleman, one of whose distinctions was that he had been a friend of Sir Walter Scott and the architect of Abbotsford; Mr. Helmore, the well-known writer on choral music; Mr. Tremenheere, who had traveled in America and had written on the subject of education in our country; and Mr. Herbert Coleridge, the gifted son of Sara Coleridge--young man of the highest promise, who had taken a double first-class at Oxford. Alas! that his mother, herself of such brilliant powers, had not lived to know of this high achievement of her son!--she whose love and thought for her children, and unwearied efforts for their intellectual advancement, are so abundantly shown in the _Memoir and Letters_ which her daughter has lately published! Alas! too, that the son for whom such high hopes had been cherished, and whose opening manhood was of such promise, was himself cut off three years after the time of which I now write! Miss Edith Coleridge, the other child of Sara Coleridge, was also present. She was even then meditating the memoir of her mother, that work of filial duty which three years ago she accomplished with a grace and propriety beyond all praise.