rains cats and dogs, you
shall go."

His reluctance to leave home had more than one side to it. Not only did
his heart stay behind, but the regular lessons of the class took him
away from occupations which in his eyes were infinitely more delightful
and important; for these were probably the years of his greatest
literary activity. As an author he never again had mere facility, or
anything like so wide a range. In September 1808, his mother writes:
"My dear Tom continues to show marks of uncommon genius. He gets on
wonderfully in all branches of his education, and the extent of
his reading, and of the knowledge he has derived from it, are truly
astonishing in a boy not yet eight years old. He is at the same time as
playful as a kitten. To give you some idea of the activity of his mind
I will mention a few circumstances that may interest you and Colin. You
will believe that to him we never appear to regard anything he does as
anything more than a schoolboy's amusement. He took it into his head to
write a compendium of Universal History about a year ago, and he really
contrived to give a tolerably connected view of the leading events from
the Creation to the present time, filling about a quire of paper. He
told me one day that he had been writing a paper, which Henry Daly
was to translate into Malabar, to persuade the people of Travancore to
embrace the Christian religion. On reading it I found it to contain a
very clear idea of the leading facts and doctrines of that religion,
with some strong arguments for its adoption. He was so fired with
reading Scott's Lay and Marmion, the former of which he got entirely,
and the latter almost entirely, by heart, merely from his delight in
reading them, that he determined on writing himself a poem in six cantos
which he called the 'Battle of Cheviot.' After he had finished about
three of the cantos of about 120 lines each, which he did in a couple of
days, he became tired of it. I make no doubt he would have finished his
design, but, as he was proceeding with it, the thought struck him of
writing an heroic poem to be called 'Olaus the Great, or the Conquest
of Mona,' in which, after the manner of Virgil, he might introduce in
prophetic song the future fortunes of the family;--among others, those
of the hero who aided in the fall of the tyrant of Mysore, after having
long suffered from his tyranny; [General Macaulay had been one of Tippoo
Sahib's prisoners] and of another of his race