Among the oldest and dearest of my friendly books is the "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay," of which I became the happy owner, when it was fresh off the press, during a sojourn in the west, far away from my home library. The dates along the margins (one of Macaulay's habits which I adopted as I read) bring pleasant thoughts of a journey from Colorado to the western coast, and long before I knew Dean Hook (whom I first met here as the Vicar of Leeds) I was pulling Macaulay down from the shelf, not indeed to drink with Sir John, but to refer to some particular talk of men or of books--always to read on and on with equal delight whether he were breakfasting with a party of old Trinity College friends, reading in his study, or acting as a guide and escort on a half holiday of sight-seeing with his nieces and nephews, with whom he was always the prince of playfellows. It was on one of these excursions to the zoological gardens that Thackeray overheard someone say, "Never mind the hippopotamus! Never mind the hippopotamus! There's Mr. =Macaulay=!" When absent he exchanged long and frequent letters with the children, sealing those to his nephew at Harrow with an amorphous mass of red wax, which, in defiance of all postal regulations, usually covered a piece of gold.
A scrap from one of his letters to a little niece will serve also as an example of the poetry, which he usually attributed to the Judicious poet, for whose collected works the children vainly searched the library.
"Michaelmas will, I hope, find us all at Clapham over a noble goose. Do you remember the beautiful Puseyette hymn on Michaelmas day? It is a great favorite with all the Tractarians. You and Alice should learn it. It begins:
'Though Quakers scowl and Baptists howl, Though Plymouth Brethren rage, We churchmen gay will wallow today In apple sauce, onions and sage.
Ply knife and fork, and draw the cork, And have the bottle handy; For each slice of goose we'll introduce A thimbleful of brandy.'
Is it not good? I wonder who the author can be? Not Newman, I think. It is above him. Perhaps it is Bishop Wilberforce."
The Macaulays and the Wilberforces living at Clapham Common are very real people to me, and my firm allegiance to Trinity College, Cambridge, has never wavered since Macaulay's undergraduate days, not even when Samuel Wilberforce, the future bishop, went up to Oriel College, Oxford.