said to a student in his law
office, "There, Tom, please to take that discourse and weed out the
Latin words."[10]

When doubtful as to the use of words, I should have been helped by a
better knowledge of Latin and enabled very often to write with a surer
touch. Though compelled to resort frequently to the dictionary, I early
learned to pay little attention to the definition but to regard with
care the illustrative meaning in the citations from standard authors.
When I began writing I used the Imperial Dictionary, an improvement over
Webster in this respect. Soon the Century Dictionary began to appear,
and best of all the New English Dictionary on historical principles
edited by Murray and Bradley and published by the Clarendon Press at
Oxford. A study of the mass of quotations in these two dictionaries
undoubtedly does much to atone for the lack of linguistic knowledge; and
the tracing of the history of words, as it is done in the Oxford
dictionary, makes any inquiry as to the meaning of a word fascinating
work for the historian. Amongst the multiplicity of aids for the student
and the writer no single one is so serviceable as this product of labor
and self-sacrifice, fostered by the Clarendon Press, to whom, all
writers in the English language owe a debt of gratitude.

Macaulay had a large fund of knowledge on which he might base his
reasoning, and his indefatigable mind welcomed any outside assistance.
He knew Greek and Latin thoroughly and a number of other languages, but
it is related of him that he so thumbed his copy of Johnson's Dictionary
that he was continually sending it to the binder. In return for his
mastery of the languages, the dictionaries are fond of quoting Macaulay.
If I may depend upon a rough mental computation, no prose writer of the
nineteenth century is so frequently cited. "He never wrote an obscure
sentence in his life," said John Morley;[11] and this is partly due to
his exact use of words. There is never any doubt about his meaning.
Macaulay began the use of Latin words at an early age. When four and a
half years old he was asked if he had got over the toothache, to which
question came this reply, "The agony is abated."

Mathematics beyond arithmetic are of no use to the historian and may be
entirely discarded. I do not ignore John Stuart Mill's able plea for
them, some words of which are worth quoting. "Mathematical studies," he
said, "are of immense benefit to the student's education by