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.

Of my host, Mr. Derwent Coleridge, and of Mrs. Coleridge, my dear and honored friends of so many years, I must not permit myself to speak.  I may note only the brilliant conversational power of Mr. Coleridge, and the fact that as I listen to him I perfectly understand the marvelous gifts in this way of his father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Again and again I have been held as if under a spell by the flowing stream of his delightful monologue.  He had been the friend in boyhood of Macaulay, and almost the first published words of the afterward famous writer had appeared in conjunction with a like youthful effort of Derwent Coleridge.  Mr. Coleridge has been the biographer of Winthrop Praed and the editor of his poems, and only a year ago he published a touching tribute to John Moultrie.  These two poets were also the companions in youth of Macaulay, and each was in a way a stimulus to the others in their first intellectual efforts.  My place at the table was just opposite to Macaulay, and I need not say with what keen interest I looked at him and watched his countenance as he became animated in conversation.  His face was round, and his complexion was colorless, one might almost say pallid:  his hair, which appeared to have been of a brownish hue, had become almost white.  He was no doubt then beginning to break in health, and perhaps this, which could only be called a premature decay, was the penalty he was at length paying for the years he had spent in India.  His neck was short, and his figure was short and ungainly.  His eye had a quick flash, and his change of expression was rapid; his head, too, had a quick movement; and altogether there was a look of vivacity which showed that his intellect was as keen as ever.  He was always ready to speak, whatever the subject, but he showed no disposition to take all the talk.  There was no moment of pause in the flowing after-dinner discussions, for our host, as well as several of his guests, was abundantly able to hold his own with this marvelous and every way delightful talker—­this prince in the domain of London social life.