You know how much such a quotation as this would fall in with my notions, averse as I am to loud and noisy tones, and self-confident, overwhelming, and yet perhaps very unsound arguments.  And you will remember how anxiously I dwelt upon this point while you were at home.  I have been in hopes that this half-year would witness a great change in you in this respect.  My hopes, however, have been a little damped by something which I heard last week through a friend, who seemed to have received an impression that you had gained a high distinction among the young gentlemen at Shelford by the loudness and vehemence of your tones.  Now, my dear Tom, you cannot doubt that this gives me pain; and it does so not so much on account of the thing itself, as because I consider it a pretty infallible test of the mind within.  I do long and pray most earnestly that the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit may be substituted for vehemence and self-confidence, and that you may be as much distinguished for the former as ever you have been for the latter.  It is a school in which I am not ambitious that any child of mine should take a high degree.

If the people of Shelford be as bad as you represent them in your letters, what are they but an epitome of the world at large?  Are they ungrateful to you for your kindnesses?  Are they foolish, and wicked, and wayward in the use of their faculties?  What is all this but what we ourselves are guilty of every day?  Consider how much in our case the guilt of such conduct is aggravated by our superior knowledge.  We shall not have ignorance to plead in its extenuation, as many of the people of Shelford may have.  Now, instead of railing at the people of Shelford, I think the best thing which you and your schoolfellows could do would be to try to reform them.  You can buy and distribute useful and striking tracts, as well as Testaments, among such as can read.  The cheap Repository and Religious Tract Society will furnish tracts suited to all descriptions of persons; and for those who cannot read—­ why should you not institute a Sunday school to be taught by yourselves, and in which appropriate rewards being given for good behaviour, not only at school but through the week, great effects of a moral kind might soon be produced?  I have exhausted my paper, and must answer the rest of your letter in a few days.  In the meantime,

I am ever your most affectionate father,

Zachary Macaulay.

A father’s prayers are seldom fulfilled to the letter.  Many years were to elapse before the son ceased to talk loudly and with confidence; and the literature that he was destined to distribute through the world was of another order from that which Mr. Macaulay here suggests.  The answer, which is addressed to the mother, affords a proof that the boy could already hold his own.  The allusions to the Christian Observer, of which his father was editor, and to Dr. Herbert Marsh, with whom the ablest pens of Clapham were at that moment engaged in hot and embittered controversy, are thrown in with an artist’s hand.