These works are surcharged with some
exaggeration, but in the main they ring true. As precocious as
Macaulay, he had much of that author's fondness for books, and when he
first went to public school at eleven years of age he had read as much
as most men when they take a college degree. His mind absorbed
languages without effort. At fifteen he could write Greek verse, and
his tutor once remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob
better than you or I could address an English one."
He lost his father at the age of seven, and his mother seems to have
given little personal attention to him. He was in nominal charge of
four guardians, and at seventeen, when his health had been seriously
reduced by lack of exercise and overdosing of medicines, the sensitive
boy ran away from the Manchester Grammar school and wandered for
several months in Wales. He was allowed a pound a week by one of his
guardians, and he made shift with this for months; but finally the
hunger for books, which he had no money to buy, sent him to London.
There he undertook to get advances from money-lenders on his
expectations. This would have been easy, as he was left a substantial
income in his father's will, but these Shylocks kept the boy waiting.
In his _Confessions_ he tells of his sufferings from want of food, of
his nights in an unfurnished house in Soho with a little girl who was
the "slavey" of a disreputable lawyer, of his wanderings in the
streets, of the saving of his life by an outcast woman whom he has
immortalized in the most eloquent passages of the book.
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