ere Macaulay spent four most industrious
years, doing less and less in the class-room as time went on, but
enjoying the rare advantage of studying Greek and Latin by the side of
such a scholar as Malden. The two companions were equally matched in age
and classical attainments, and at the university maintained a rivalry so
generous as hardly to deserve the name. Each of the pupils had his own
chamber, which the others were forbidden to enter under the penalty of
a shilling fine. This prohibition was in general not very strictly
observed; but the tutor had taken the precaution of placing Macaulay
in a room next his own;--a proximity which rendered the position of an
intruder so exceptionally dangerous that even Malden could not remember
having once passed his friend's threshold during the whole of their stay
at Aspenden.

In this seclusion, removed from the delight of family intercourse, (the
only attraction strong enough to draw him from his books,) the boy
read widely, unceasingly, more than rapidly. The secret of his immense
acquirements lay in two invaluable gifts of nature,--an unerring memory,
and the capacity for taking in at a glance the contents of a printed
page. During the first part of his life he remembered whatever caught
his fancy without going through the process of consciously getting it
by heart. As a child, during one of the numerous seasons when the social
duties devolved upon Mr. Macaulay, he accompanied his father on an
afternoon call, and found on a table the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which
he had never before met with. He kept himself quiet with his prize while
the elders were talking, and, on his return home, sat down upon his
mother's bed, and repeated to her as many cantos as she had the patience
or the strength to listen to. At one period of his life he was known to
say that, if by some miracle of Vandalism all copies of Paradise Lost
and the Pilgrim's Progress were destroyed off the face of the earth,
he would undertake to reproduce them both from recollection whenever
a revival of learning came. In 1813, while waiting in a Cambridge
coffee-room for a postchaise which was to take him to his school, he
picked up a county newspaper containing two such specimens of provincial
poetical talent as in those days might be read in the corner of any
weekly journal. One piece was headed "Reflections of an Exile;" while
the other was a trumpery parody on the Welsh ballad "Ar hyd y nos,"
referring to some