With these endowments, sharpened by an insatiable curiosity, from his fourteenth year onward he was permitted to roam almost at will over the whole expanse of literature.  He composed little beyond his school exercises, which themselves bear signs of having been written in a perfunctory manner.  At this period he had evidently no heart in anything but his reading.  Before leaving Shelford for Aspenden he had already invoked the epic muse for the last time.

 “Arms and the man I sing, who strove in vain
  To save green Erin from a foreign reign.”

The man was Roderic, king of Connaught, whom he got tired of singing before he had well completed two books of the poem.  Thenceforward he appears never to have struck his lyre, except in the first enthusiasm aroused by the intelligence of some favourable turn of fortune on the Continent.  The flight of Napoleon from Russia was celebrated in a “Pindaric Ode” duly distributed into strophes and antistrophes; and, when the allies entered Paris, the school put his services into requisition to petition for a holiday in honour of the event.  He addressed his tutor in a short poem, which begins with a few sonorous and effective couplets, grows more and more like the parody on Fitzgerald in “Rejected Addresses,” and ends in a peroration of which the intention is unquestionably mock-heroic: 

 “Oh, by the glorious posture of affairs,
  By the enormous price that Omnium hears,
  By princely Bourbon’s late recovered Crown,
  And by Miss Fanny’s safe return from town,
  Oh, do not thou, and thou alone, refuse
  To show thy pleasure at this glorious news!”

Touched by the mention of his sister, Mr. Preston yielded and young Macaulay never turned another verse except at the bidding of his schoolmaster, until, on the eve of his departure for Cambridge, he wrote between three and four hundred lines of a drama, entitled “Don Fernando,” marked by force and fertility of diction, but somewhat too artificial to be worthy of publication under a name such as his.  Much about the same time he communicated to Malden the commencement of a burlesque poem on the story of Anthony Babington; who, by the part that he took in the plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth, had given the family a connection with English history which, however questionable, was in Macaulay’s view better than none.

 “Each, says the proverb, has his taste.  ’Tis true. 
  Marsh loves a controversy; Coates a play;
  Bennet a felon; Lewis Way a Jew;
  The Jew the silver spoons of Lewis Way. 
  The Gipsy Poetry, to own the truth,
  Has been my love through childhood and in youth.”

It is perhaps as well that the project to all appearance stopped with the first stanza, which in its turn was probably written for the sake of a single line.  The young man had a better use for his time than to spend it in producing frigid imitations of Beppo.