He twice gained the Chancellor's medal for English verse, with poems admirably planned, and containing passages of real beauty, but which may not be republished in the teeth of the panegyric which, within ten years after they were written, he pronounced upon Sir Roger Newdigate.

Sir Roger had laid down the rule that no exercise sent in for the prize which he established at Oxford was to exceed fifty lines.

This law, says Macaulay, seems to have more foundation in reason than is generally the case with a literary canon, "for the world, we believe, is pretty well agreed in thinking that the shorter a prize poem is, the better." Trinity men find it difficult to understand how it was that he missed getting one of the three silver goblets given for the best English Declamations of the year.

If there is one thing which all Macaulay's friends, and all his enemies, admit, it is that he could declaim English.

His own version of the affair was that the Senior Dean, a relative of the victorious candidate, sent for him and said: "Mr.
Macaulay, as you have not got the first cup, I do not suppose that you will care for either of the others." He was consoled, however, by the prize for Latin Declamation; and in 1821 he established his classical repute by winning a Craven University scholarship in company with his friend Malden, and Mr.George Long, who preceded Malden as Professor of Greek at University College, London.
Macaulay detested the labour of manufacturing Greek and Latin verse in cold blood as an exercise; and his Hexameters were never up to the best Etonian mark, nor his Iambics to the highest standard of Shrewsbury.