Day set on Cumbria’s hills supreme,
 And, Menai, on thy silver stream. 
 The star of day had reached the West. 
 Now in the main it sank to rest. 
 Shone great Eleindyn’s castle tall: 
 Shone every battery, every hall: 
 Shone all fair Mona’s verdant plain;
 But chiefly shone the foaming main.

And again

 “Long,” said the Prince, “shall Olave’s name
 Live in the high records of fame. 
 Fair Mona now shall trembling stand
 That ne’er before feared mortal hand. 
 Mona, that isle where Ceres’ flower
 In plenteous autumn’s golden hour
 Hides all the fields from man’s survey
 As locusts hid old Egypt’s day.”

The passage containing a prophetic mention of his father and uncle after the manner of the sixth book of the Aeneid, for the sake of which, according to Mrs. Macaulay, the poem was originally designed, can nowhere be discovered.  It is possible that in the interval between the conception and the execution the boy happened to light upon a copy of the Rolliad.  If such was the case, he already had too fine a sense of humour to have persevered in his original plan after reading that masterpiece of drollery.  It is worthy of note that the voluminous writings of his childhood, dashed off at headlong speed in the odds and ends of leisure from school-study and nursery routine, are not only perfectly correct in spelling and grammar, but display the same lucidity of meaning, and scrupulous accuracy in punctuation and the other minor details of the literary art, which characterise his mature works.

Nothing could be more judicious than the treatment that Mr. and Mrs. Macaulay adopted towards their boy.  They never handed his productions about, or encouraged him to parade his powers of conversation or memory.  They abstained from any word or act which might foster in him a perception of his own genius with as much care as a wise millionaire expends on keeping his son ignorant of the fact that he is destined to be richer than his comrades.  “It was scarcely ever,” writes one who knew him well from the very first, “that the consciousness was expressed by either of his parents of the superiority of their son over other children.  Indeed, with his father I never remember any such expression.  What I most observed myself was his extraordinary command of language.  When he came to describe to his mother any childish play, I took care to be present, when I could, that I might listen to the way in which he expressed himself, often scarcely exceeded in his later years.  Except this trifle, I remember him only as a good-tempered boy, always occupied, playing with his sisters without assumption of any kind.”  One effect of this early discipline showed itself in his freedom from vanity and susceptibility,—­those qualities which, coupled together in our modern psychological dialect under the head of “self-consciousness,” are supposed to be the besetting defects of the literary