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Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay - Volume 1 by Sir George Otto Trevelyan
page 46 of 538 (08%)
to place him as a day-scholar at Westminster. Thorough as was the
consideration which the parents gave to the matter, their
decision was of more importance than they could at the time
foresee. If their son had gone to a public school, it is more
than probable that he would have turned out a different man, and
have done different work. So sensitive and homeloving a boy might
for a while have been too depressed to enter fully unto the ways
of the place; but, as he gained confidence, he could not have
withstood the irresistible attractions which the life of a great
school exercises over a vivid eager nature, and he would have
sacrificed to passing pleasures and emulations a part, at any
rate, of those years which, in order to be what he was, it was
necessary that he should spend wholly among his books.
Westminster or Harrow might have sharpened his faculties for
dealing with affairs and with men; but the world at large would
have lost more than he could by any possibility have gained. If
Macaulay had received the usual education of a young Englishman,
he might in all probability have kept his seat for Edinburgh; but
he could hardly have written the Essay on Von Ranke, or the
description of England in the third chapter of the History.

Mr. Macaulay ultimately fixed upon a private school, kept by the
Rev. Mr. Preston, at Little Shelford, a village in the immediate
vicinity of Cambridge. The motives which guided this selection
were mainly of a religious nature. Mr. Preston held extreme Low
Church opinions, and stood in the good books of Mr. Simeon, whose
word had long been law in the Cambridge section of the
Evangelical circle. But whatever had been the inducement to make
it, the choice proved singularly fortunate. The tutor, it is
true, was narrow in his views, and lacked the taste and judgment
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