The Argosy — page 62: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

52 The Mother of Lord Macaulay. considerable change for Selina, for in those days there was a yet wider difference than there is now between a provincial town and the capital. When, however, the birth of Mrs. Macaulay’s first child was at hand, her sister-in-law, Mrs. Babington, with all the pretty fussy anxiety of a young matron, asked her to come and stay at Rothley Temple for the important event. Accordingly, Selina and her baby clothes travelled down into Leicestershire. Rothley Temple was the very embodiment of the popular idea of an old manor house. There were long dark passages in which ghosts might flit up and down. There were deep bay windows in which lovers might whisper. There were broad fire- places by which grandmothers might sit and tell tales of the olden time. In this house of romance and memory, in the year 1800, Thomas Babington Macaulay was born. There is no point of her life in which the strong good sense of Selina Macaulay shows itself so fully as in her treatment of her son. Most mothers, from the day when the wonderful boy read fluently at three years old to the day when he made his maiden speech in parlia- ment, would have spent their time in a state of perpetual adoration before him. First in praise of the child, then in honour of the youth, the litany of foolish indiscriminating love would have flowed on, till very likely all that was best in his nature would have been choked by such a cloud of incense. Dearly though she loved her son, proud though were the pulses which stirred her heart when she dreamt of his future, Selina Macaulay never let her affection for him work him injury. When, at seven or eight, he wrote hymns and began epic poems, she talked to him as if such things were as common with boys of his age as marbles or nine-pins. When, with something of the wayward- ness of young genius, he wanted to be idle, she kept him gently but firmly to the path of steady work. On the other hand, when his father, with that touch of sternness which was inherent in his nature, expected in the boy more thoughtful regularity of conduct than was compatible with either his years or his superabundant energy, she put herself between the two as a judicious barrier. The affection with which young Macaulay regarded his home seems to have had something almost passionate in its character. We know whose was the genial and gracious influence which, like a golden thread, ran through that large family, from the hard-worked father down to the prattling baby, making that home a place in which her gifted son could find rest and joy; we know it, and feel that the mother of a Thomas Babington Macaulay has as great a mission in the world as a Madame de Stael or an Elizabeth Fry. One great and good work which Selina Macaulay did for her son was the thorough early knowledge she put into him of Scripture. Macaulay's style and diction would probably never have been what they are if the English Bible had not been thus deeply laid) in ‘his comicbooks.com