Footnote 1: [The object of the Congress proposed by the Emperor Napoleon was to extricate himself from the embarrassments in which he was placed by the terms of the Peace of Villafranca with reference to the affairs of Italy. The proposal to establish a Confederation of the Italian States was found to be impracticable, and the unification of Italy was a more difficult problem than the conquest and cession to Piedmont of the Milanese territory. M. de Cavour was the only statesman who contemplated the entire realisation of this vast scheme, which was at last accomplished by revolutionary means, without the concurrence of France. His views were shared and supported by Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and Mr. Gladstone.] [Sidenote: DEATH OF MACAULAY.] _January 2nd, 1860._--The death of Macaulay is the extinction of a great light, and although every expectation of the completion of his great work had long ago vanished, the sudden close of his career, and the certainty that we shall have no more of his History, or at most only the remaining portion of King William's reign (which it is understood he had nearly prepared for publication), is a serious disappointment to the world. His health was so broken that his death can hardly create any surprise, but there had been no reason lately to apprehend that the end was so near. I have mentioned the circumstance of my first meeting him, after which we became rather intimate in a general way, and he used frequently to invite me to those breakfasts in the Albany at which he used to collect small miscellaneous parties, generally including some remarkable people, and at which he loved to pour forth all those stores of his mind and accumulations of his memory to which his humbler guests, like myself, used to listen with delighted admiration, and enjoy as the choicest of intellectual feasts. I don't think he was ever so entirely agreeable as at his own breakfast table, though I shall remember as long as I live the pleasant days I have spent in his society at Bowood, Holland House, and elsewhere. Nothing was more remarkable in Macaulay than the natural way in which he talked, never for the sake of display or to manifest his superior powers and knowledge. On the contrary, he was free from any assumption of superiority over others, and seemed to be impressed with the notion that those he conversed with knew as much as himself, and he was always quite as ready to listen as to talk. 'Don't you remember?' he was in the habit of saying when he quoted some book or alluded to some fact to listeners who could not remember, because in nineteen cases out of twenty they had never known or heard of whatever it was he alluded to. I do not believe anybody ever left his society with any feeling of mortification, except that which an involuntary comparison between his knowledge and their own ignorance could not fail to engender. For some years past I had seen little or nothing of Macaulay. His own health