self 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
into the garden under pretence of a lecture on botany; sending him from
his books to run round the grounds, or play at cooking in the kitchen;
giving him Bible lessons which invariably ended in a theological
argument, and following him with her advice and sympathy through his
multifarious literary enterprises. ["The next time," (my uncle once said
to us,) "that I saw Hannah More was in 1807. The old ladies begged my
parents to leave me with them for a week, and this visit was a great
event in my life. In parlour and kitchen they could not make enough of
me. They taught me to cook; and I was to preach, and they got in people
from the fields and I stood on a chair, and preached sermons. I might
have been indicted for holding a conventicle."]