The father’s first London home was near by Lombard Street, where he managed an African agency under the firm name of Macaulay & Babington; and the baby Macaulay used to be wheeled into an open square near by, for the enjoyment of such winter’s sunshine as fell there at far-away intervals. His boyish memories, however, belonged to a later home at Clapham, then a suburban village. There, was his first schooling, and there he budded out--to the wonderment of all his father’s guests--into young poems and the drollest of precocious talk. His pleasant biographer (Trevelyan) tells of a visit the bright boy made at Strawberry Hill--Walpole’s old showplace. There was a spilling of hot drink of some sort, during the visitation, which came near to scalding the lad; and when the sympathizing hostess asked after his suffering: “Thank you, madam,” said he, “the agony is abated!” The story is delightfully credible; and so are other pleasant ones of his reciting some of his doggerel verses to Hannah More and getting a gracious and approving nod of her gray curls and of her mob-cap. At Cambridge, where he went at the usual student age, he studied what he would, and discarded what he would--as he did all through his life. For mathematics he had a distinguished repugnance, then and always; and if brought to task by them in those student days--trying hard to twist their certainties into probabilities, and so make them subject to that world of “ifs and buts” which he loved to start buzzing about the ears of those who loved the exact sciences better than he. He missed thus some of the University honors, it is true; yet, up and down in those Cambridge coteries he was a man looked for, and listened to, eagerly and bravely applauded. Certain scholastic honors, too, he did reap, in spite of his lunges outside the traces; there was a medal for his poem of _Pompeii_; and a Fellowship, at last, which gave him a needed, though small income--his father’s Afric business having proved a failure, and no home moneys coming to him thereafter. The first writings of Macaulay which had public issue were printed in _Knight’s Quarterly Magazine_--among them were criticisms on Italian writers, a remarkable imaginary conversation between “Cowley and Milton,” and the glittering, jingling battle verses about the War of the League and stout “Henry of Navarre”--full to the brim of that rush and martial splendor which he loved all his life, and which he brought in later years to his famous re-heralding of the _Lays of Ancient Rome_. A few lines are cited:--