character.  Another result was his habitual over-estimate of the average knowledge possessed by mankind.  Judging others by himself, he credited the world at large with an amount of information which certainly few have the ability to acquire, or the capacity to retain.  If his parents had not been so diligent in concealing from him the difference between his own intellectual stores and those of his neighbours, it is probable that less would have been heard of Lord Macaulay’s Schoolboy.

The system pursued at home was continued at Barley Wood, the place where the Misses More resided from 1802 onwards.  Mrs. Macaulay gladly sent her boy to a house where he was encouraged without being spoiled, and where he never failed to be a welcome guest.  The kind old ladies made a real companion of him, and greatly relished his conversation; while at the same time, with their ideas on education, they would never have allowed him, even if he had been so inclined, to forget that he was a child.  Mrs. Hannah More, who had the rare gift of knowing how to live with both young and old, was the most affectionate and the wisest of friends, and readily undertook the superintendence of his studies, his pleasures, and his health.  She would keep him with her for weeks, listening to him as he read prose by the ell, declaimed poetry by the hour, and discussed and compared his favourite heroes, ancient, modern, and fictitious, under all points of view and in every possible combination; coaxing him into the garden under pretence of a lecture on botany; sending him from his books to run round the grounds, or play at cooking in the kitchen; giving him Bible lessons which invariably ended in a theological argument, and following him with her advice and sympathy through his multifarious literary enterprises. ["The next time,” (my uncle once said to us,) “that I saw Hannah More was in 1807.  The old ladies begged my parents to leave me with them for a week, and this visit was a great event in my life.  In parlour and kitchen they could not make enough of me.  They taught me to cook; and I was to preach, and they got in people from the fields and I stood on a chair, and preached sermons.  I might have been indicted for holding a conventicle.”] She writes to his father in 1809:  “I heartily hope that the sea air has been the means of setting you up, and Mrs. Macaulay also, and that the dear little poet has caught his share of bracing . . . .  Tell Tom I desire to know how ‘Olaus’ goes on.  The sea, I suppose, furnished him with some new images.”

The broader and more genial aspect under which life showed itself to the boy at Barley Wood has left its trace in a series of childish squibs and parodies, which may still be read with an interest that his Cambrian and Scandinavian rhapsodies fail to inspire.  The most ambitious of these lighter efforts is a pasquinade occasioned by some local scandal, entitled “Childe Hugh and the labourer, a pathetic ballad.”  The “Childe” of the story was a neighbouring