Prescott met both Disraeli and Gladstone, and, among other more purely literary men, Macaulay, Lockhart, Hallam, Thirlwall, Milman, and Rogers. Of Macaulay he tells some interesting things. "I have met him several times, and breakfasted with him the other morning. His memory for quotations and illustration is a miracle--quite disconcerting. He comes to a talk like one specially crammed. Yet you may start the topic. He told me he should be delivered of twins on his next publication, which would not be till '53.... Macaulay's first draught--very unlike Scott's--is absolutely illegible from erasures and corrections.... He tells me he has his moods for writing. When not in the vein, he does not press it.... H---- told me that Lord Jeffrey once told him that, having tripped up Macaulay in a quotation from _Paradise Lost_, two days after, Macaulay came to him and said, 'You will not catch me again in the _Paradise_.' At which Jeffrey opened the volume and took him up in a great number of passages at random, in all of which he went on correctly repeating the original. Was it not a miraculous _tour d'esprit_? Macaulay does not hesitate to say now that he thinks he could restore the first six or seven books of the _Paradise_ in case they were lost." Still again, Prescott expresses his astonishment at Macaulay's memory. "Macaulay is the most of a miracle. His _tours_ in the way of memory stagger belief.... His talk is like the laboured, but still unintermitting, jerks of a pump. But it is anything but wishy-washy. It keeps the mind, however, on too great a tension for table-talk." Writing of Samuel Rogers, who was now a very old man, he records a characteristic little anecdote. "I have seen Rogers several times, that is, all that is out of the bedclothes. His talk is still _sauce piquante_. The best thing on record of his late sayings is his reply to Lady----, who at a dinner table, observing him speaking to a lady, said, 'I hope, Mr. Rogers, you are not attacking me.' 'Attacking you!' he said, 'why, my dear Lady----, I have been all my life defending you.' Wit could go no further."