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."
Prescott was the guest of the Duke of Sutherland at Trentham and at Stafford House. He was invited to Lord Lansdowne's, the Duke of Northumberland's, the Duke of Argyle's, and to Lord Grey's, and he describes himself in one letter as up to his ears in dances, dinners, and breakfasts. This sort of life, with all its glitter and gayety, suited Prescott wonderfully well, and his health improved daily. He remarked, however: "It is a life which, were I an Englishman, I should not desire a great deal of; two months at most; although I think, on the whole, the knowledge of a very curious state of society and of so many interesting and remarkable characters, well compensate the bore of a voyage. Yet I am quite sure, having once had this experience, nothing would ever induce me to repeat it, as I have heard you say it would not pay." Some little personal notes and memoranda may also be quoted.
"Everything is drawn into the vortex, and there they swim round and round, so that you may revolve for weeks and not meet a familiar face half a dozen times. Yet there is monotony in some things—that everlasting turbot and shrimp sauce. I shall never abide a turbot again."
"Do you know, by the way, that I have become a courtier and affect the royal presence? I wish you could see my gallant costume, gold-laced coat, white inexpressibles, silk hose, gold-buckled patent slippers, sword and chapeau. Am I not playing the fool as well as my betters?"
"A silly woman ... said when I told her it was thirty years since I was here, 'Pooh! you are not more than thirty years old.' And on my repeating it, she still insisted on the same flattering ejaculation. The Bishop of London the other day with his amiable family told me they had settled my age at forty.... So I am convinced there has been some error in the calculation. Ask mother how it is. They say here that gray hair, particularly whiskers, may happen to anybody even under thirty. On the whole, I am satisfied that I am the youngest of the family."