He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, a man who had distinguished himself as an anti-slavery philanthropist even among men like Stephen, Clarkson, and Wilberforce. His mother was a daughter of Thomas Mills, a bookseller, and a Quaker. Though the lad did not inherit a fortune, his father was able without much inconvenience to give him the advantages of an education at one of the universities. Up to the age of thirteen he was taught almost exclusively by his mother; and when he was at length placed in a private school, his brightness and eagerness of mind astonished all those with whom he came in contact. That most charming of all biographies of literary men, Trevelyan’s “Life and Letters of Macaulay,” teems with evidence of his singular attainments at an early age. At Cambridge, which he entered at the age of eighteen, he devoted himself with great fervor to the study of the classics, to reading in history and general literature, and to the development of his abilities as an extemporaneous speaker. He took whatever prizes came in his way, but, owing to his distaste for the mathematics, did not try for honors at the completion of his course. On leaving the university with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1822, his mental habits and peculiarities seem to have been substantially fixed. He was already master of vast stores of information, which he always seemed to keep under the play of his wit and his imagination. His memory was so prodigious that he could repeat the names of the popes either backward or forward; and he once remarked that if every copy of the “Paradise Lost” were to be destroyed, he thought he could reproduce the poem from memory. He read with such marvellous rapidity that he would devour a book in the course of a morning walk in London; and the vast accumulations which he thus brought into the range of his knowledge were so vitalized by his feelings and his imagination that they were always completely at his service. Though his biographer shows us that he was one of the most charming and lovable of men, his writings would convey another impression. He appears never to have had any self-distrust; he was seldom in doubt on any subject; what to others seemed mere probabilities were to him positive certainties; indeed, on whatever question he wrote or spoke his opinions always seemed to have been irrevocably fixed long before. Lord Melbourne told the whole story when he once said: “I wish I was as cock-sure of any thing as Tom Macaulay is of every thing.”