Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark

Here is an incident that amused me from the childhood of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Victorian man of letters and colonial administrator in India:

“He was a highly precocious and sensitive child. He was reading by the age of three, and even as a small boy he astonished adults with his odd learning and recondite vocabulary. He very early showed the two salient features of his published work, a love of rhetoric and a highly retentive memory. The Bible in King James’s version was the earliest and probably the greatest influence. When as a little child he found a maid had thrown away the oyster shells with which he had marked out a plot in the garden, he came into his mother’s drawing-room and declared, ‘Cursed be Sally: for it is written, Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.’ This childish outburst illustrates the pattern of Macaulay’s more mature controversies. His reading was so insatiable, his head so filled with eloquent phrases that his response was often quite unsuited to the occasion. Interior conviction was always more important to him than its social effects.”

(William Thomas, ‘Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron Macaulay (1800–1859)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)