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Macaulay's Milton, Ed. to Illustrate the Laws of Rhetoric and Composition by A. Mackie
Macaulay's Milton Ed to Illustrate the Laws of Rhetoric and Composition by A Mackie Author:Thomas Babington Macaulay General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1884 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: LIFE OF MACAULAY. THOMAS Babington Macaulay, whose father was Zachary Macaulay -- famous for his advocacy of the abolition of slavery, was born at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, towards the end of 1800. From his infancy he showed a precocity that was simply extraordinary. He not only acquired knowledge rapidly, but he possessed a marvellous power of working it up into literary form, and his facile pen produced compositions in prose and in verse, histories, odes, and hymns. From the time that he was- three years old he read incessantly, for the most part lying on the rug before the fire with his book on the ground, and a piece of bread and butter in his hand. It is told of him that when a boy of four, and on a visit with his father he was unfortunate enough to have a cup of hot coffee overturned on his legs, and when his hostess in her sympathetic kindness, asked shortly after how he was feeling, he looked up in her face and said, ' Thank you, madam, the agony is abated'. At seven he wrote a compendium of Universal History. At eight, he was so fired with the Lay and with Marmion, that he wrote three cantos of a poem in imitation of Scott's manner, and called it the ' Battle of Cheviot'. And he had many other literary projects, in all of which he showed perfect correctness both in grammar and in spelling, made his meaning uniformly clear, and was scrupulously accurate in his punctuation. With all this cleverness he was not conceited. His parents, and particularly his mother, were most judicious in their treatment. They never encouraged him to display his powers of conversation, and they abstained f...« less