Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 34.djvu/416

 In 1761 he was presented by Archibald, duke of Argyll, to the parish of Ardnamurchan, Argyllshire, and was admitted there on 15 July. On 10 Oct. 1772 he was translated to Braaven, now known as Calder or Cawdor.

Macaulay was sent by the kirk on a special mission to St. Kilda in 1759, and published as his own composition in 1764 ‘History of St. Kilda, containing a Description of this Remarkable Island, the Manners and Customs of its Inhabitants, the Religious and Pagan Antiquities there found, with many other curious and interesting particulars.’ The volume was shown to Dr. Johnson by Boswell previous to his visit to the Hebrides in 1773. Johnson pronounced it ‘very well written, except some foppery about liberty and slavery.’ With Boswell he visited Macaulay on his journey to the Hebrides, and from conversation with him came to the conclusion that he could not have written the book. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘a combination in it of which Macaulay is not capable.’ Johnson may have been partly influenced in his opinion by a discussion he had on the English clergy with Macaulay, who was by no means respectful towards episcopal claims. Johnson pronounced him a ‘bigot to laxness.’ Boswell was told that the book had been written by Dr. John Macpherson of Skye from materials supplied by Macaulay, and this is confirmed by Croker.

Macaulay died on 2 March 1779, in his fifty-sixth year. By his wife, Penelope Macleod, whom he married on 4 Aug. 1758, he had a son Niel, who became a missionary minister at Harris. 

MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON (1800–1859), historian, eldest child of  [q. v.], was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, the seat of Zachary Macaulay's brother-in-law, Thomas Babington, on 25 Oct. 1800, the day of St. Crispin, and of the battle of Agincourt. His first two years were spent in Birchin Lane, whence his parents moved to a house in the High Street of Clapham. From the age of three he read incessantly, and talked in ‘printed words.’ Hannah More made a pet of him when he was four, and about the same time his father took him to Strawberry Hill, where he saw the Orford collections, and ever afterwards carried the catalogue in his memory. He was, with all his precocity, a simple and merry child. He rambled on Clapham Common, and discovered the Alps and Mount Sinai in its ridges and hillocks. He was sent as a day-boy to a Mr. Greaves. When he was seven he began a compendium of universal history; at eight he wrote a treatise intended to convert the natives of Malabar to Christianity; and after learning Scott's ‘Lay’ and ‘Marmion’ by heart, he took to composing poems and hymns. A poem on Olaus Magnus of Norway, the supposed ancestor of the Macaulays, is an echo of Scott. His parents and Hannah More, with whom he often stayed at Barley Wood, judiciously refrained from stimulating his self-consciousness, and left him, it seems, under the impression that all schoolboys knew as much as himself. Hannah More started his library by presents of books. In 1812 Macaulay was sent to a school, kept at Little Shelford, near Cambridge, by the Rev. Mr. Preston, which in 1814 was moved to Aspenden Hall, near Buntingford, Hertfordshire. Preston was a strong evangelical, and a friend of Milner, president of Queens' College, Cambridge, then one of the chief representatives of the school. Milner recognised the boy's promise. Macaulay's parents not only sent him religious and moral advice, but wrote of the political topics most interesting to them in terms which implied that he fully shared their interest. [q. v.], afterwards known as a Greek scholar, was his ablest companion. He read voraciously, and with astonishing rapidity. His powers of memory are shown by the fact that forty years later he repeated a scrap from the poet's corner of a country newspaper of 1813, which he had never recalled in the interval. He thought that he could reproduce ‘Paradise Lost’ and the ‘Pilgrim's Progress’ if every copy had been lost. His reading was of the most miscellaneous kind. In the holidays, while his playfulness made him the delight of his brothers and sisters, he used to read aloud in the evenings, one summer being devoted to ‘Sir Charles Grandison.’ His father disapproved of novel-reading, but incautiously inserted in the ‘Christian Observer’ a defence of the practice, with eulogies upon Fielding and Smollett, written, as afterwards appeared, by his son. This was Macaulay's first appearance in print, except an index to the thirteenth volume of the same periodical. Zachary Macaulay, though inclined to austere views, was never really harsh to his son, whose thoughts were led to public life by the political agitation against slavery, of which the father's house was a centre.

In October 1818 Macaulay began residence at Trinity College, Cambridge. He shared lodgings in Jesus Lane with Henry Sykes Thornton, eldest son of Henry Thornton, a