of Travancore to embrace the Christian religion.  On reading it I found it to contain a very clear idea of the leading facts and doctrines of that religion, with some strong arguments for its adoption.  He was so fired with reading Scott’s Lay and Marmion, the former of which he got entirely, and the latter almost entirely, by heart, merely from his delight in reading them, that he determined on writing himself a poem in six cantos which he called the ’Battle of Cheviot.’  After he had finished about three of the cantos of about 120 lines each, which he did in a couple of days, he became tired of it.  I make no doubt he would have finished his design, but, as he was proceeding with it, the thought struck him of writing an heroic poem to be called ’Olaus the Great, or the Conquest of Mona,’ in which, after the manner of Virgil, he might introduce in prophetic song the future fortunes of the family;—­ among others, those of the hero who aided in the fall of the tyrant of Mysore, after having long suffered from his tyranny; [General Macaulay had been one of Tippoo Sahib’s prisoners] and of another of his race who had exerted himself for the deliverance of the wretched Africans.  He has just begun it.  He has composed I know not how many hymns.  I send you one, as a specimen, in his own handwriting, which he wrote about six months ago on one Monday morning while we were at breakfast.”

The affection of the last generation of his relatives has preserved all these pieces, but the piety of this generation will refrain from submitting them to public criticism.  A marginal note, in which Macaulay has expressed his cordial approval of Uncle Toby’s [Tristram Shandy, chapter clxiii.] remark about the great Lipsius, indicates his own wishes in the matter too clearly to leave any choice for those who come after him.  But there still may be read in a boyish scrawl the epitome of Universal History, from “a new king who knew not Joseph,”—­down through Rameses, and Dido, and Tydeus, and Tarquin, and Crassus, and Gallienus, and Edward the Martyr,—­to Louis, who “set off on a crusade against the Albigenses,” and Oliver Cromwell, who “was an unjust and wicked man.”  The hymns remain, which Mrs. Hannah More, surely a consummate judge of the article, pronounced to be “quite extraordinary for such a baby.”  To a somewhat later period probably belongs a vast pile of blank verse, entitled “Fingal, a poem in xii books;” two of which are in a complete and connected shape, while the rest of the story is lost amidst a labyrinth of many hundred scattered lines, so transcribed as to suggest a conjecture that the boy’s demand for foolscap had outrun the paternal generosity.

Of all his performances, that which attracted most attention at the time was undertaken for the purpose of immortalising Olaus Magnus, King of Norway, from whom the clan to which the bard belonged was supposed to derive its name.  Two cantos are extant, of which there are several exemplars, in every stage of calligraphy from the largest round hand downwards, a circumstance which is apparently due to the desire on the part of each of the little Macaulays to possess a copy of the great family epic.  The opening stanzas, each of which contains more lines than their author counted years, go swinging along with plenty of animation and no dearth of historical and geographical allusion.