They had had a difference about a quotation from Paradise Lost, and made a wager about it; the wager being a copy of the hook, which, on reference to the passage, it was found Jeffrey had won.
The bet was made just before, and paid immediately after, the Easter vacation.

On putting the volume into Jeffrey's hand, your uncle said, 'I don't think you will find me tripping again.

I knew it, I thought, pretty well before; but I am sure I know it now.' Jeffrey proceeded to examine him, putting him on at a variety of the heaviest passages--the battle of the angels--the dialogues of Adam and the archangels,--and found him ready to declaim them all, till he begged him to stop.

He asked him how he had acquired such a command of the poem, and had for answer: 'I had him in the country, and I read it twice over, and I don't think that I shall ever forget it again.' At the same time he told Jeffrey that he believed he could repeat everything of his own he had ever printed, and nearly all he had ever written, 'except, perhaps, some of my college exercises.' "I myself had an opportunity of seeing and hearing a remarkable proof of your uncle's hold upon the most insignificant verbiage that chance had poured into his ear.

I was staying with him at Bowood, in the winter of 1852.