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 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