a torrent of other occurrences or engagements, nor lost in the crowd or clamour of other loud or importunate affairs.

Talking over the things which you have read with your companions on the first proper opportunity you have for it, is a most useful manner of review or repetition, in order to fix them upon the mind. Teach them your younger friends, in order to establish your own knowledge while you communicate it to them. The animal powers of your tongue and of your ear, as well as your intellectual faculties, will all join together to help the memory. Hermetas studied hard in a remote corner of the land, and in solitude, yet he became a very learned man. He seldom was so happy as to enjoy suitable society at home, and therefore he talked over to the fields and the woods in the evening, what he had been reading in the day, and found so considerable advantage by this practice that he recommended it to all his friends, since he could set his probatum to it for seventeen years.

5. Pleasure and delight in the things we learn, gives great assistance towards the remembrance of them. Whatsoever therefore we desire that a child should commit to his memory, make it as pleasant to him as possible; endeavour to search his genius and his temper, and let him take in the instructions you give him, or the lessons you appoint him, as far as may be, in a way suited to his natural inclination. Fabellus would never learn any moral lessons till they were moulded into the form of some fiction or fable like those of Æsop, or till they put on the appearance of a parable, like those wherein our blessed Saviour taught the ignorant world: then he remembered well the emblematical instructions that were given him, and learnt to practise the moral sense and meaning of them. Young Spectorius was taught virtue by setting before him a variety of examples of the various good qualities in human life; and he was appointed daily to repeat some story of this kind out of Valerius Maximus. The same lad was early instructed to avoid the common vices and follies of youth in the same manner. This is akin to the method whereby the Lacedæmonians trained up their children to hate drunk

enness and intemperance, viz. by bringing a drunken man into their company, and showing them what a beast he had made of himself. Such visible and sensible forms of instruction will make long and useful impressions upon the memory.

Children may be taught to remember many things in a way of sport and play. Some young creatures have learnt their letters and syllables, and the pronouncing and spelling of words, by having them pasted or written upon many little flat tablets or dies. Some have been taught vocabularies of different languages, having a word in one tongue, written on one side of these tablets, and the same word in another tongue on the other side of them.

There might be also many entertaining contrivances for the instruction of children in several things relating to geometry, geography, and astronomy, in such alluring and illusory methods, which would make a most agreeable and lasting impression on their minds.

6. The memory of useful things may receive considerable aid if they are thrown into verse: for the numbers and measures, and rhyme, according to the poesy of different languages, have a considerable influence upon mankind, both to make them receive with more ease the things proposed to their observation, and preserve them longer in their remembrance. How many are there of the common affairs of human life which have been taught in early years by the help of rhyme, and have been like nails fastened in a sure place and riveted by daily use. So the number of the days of each month are engraven on the memory of thousands by these four lines:

Thirty days hath September,
June and April and November:
February twenty-eight alone,
And all the rest have thirty-one.

So lads have been taught frugality by surveying and judging of their own expenses by these three lines:

Compute the pence but of one day's expense;
So many pounds, and angels, groats, and pence,
Are spent in one whole year's circumference,

For the number of days in a year is three hundred and sixty-five, which number of pence makes one pound, one angel, one groat, and one penny.

So have rules of health been prescribed in the book called Schola Salernitani, and many a person has preserved himself doubtless from evening gluttony, and the pains and diseases consequent upon it, by these two lines: Ex magnâ cœnâ stomacho fit maxima pœna: Ut sis nocte levis, sit tibi cæna brevis.

Englished:

To be easy all night

Let your supper be light;
Or else you'll complain
Of a stomach in pain.

And a hundred proverbial sentences in various languages are formed into rhyme or a verse, whereby they are made to stick upon the memory of old and young.

It is from this principle that moral rules have been cast into a poetic mould from all antiquity. So the golden verses of the Pythagoreans in Greek; Cato's Distichs De Moribus in Latin; Lilly's precepts to scholars called Qui Mihi, with many others; and this has been done with very good success. A line or two of this kind recurring on the memory, have often guarded youth from a temptation to vice and folly, as well as put them in mind of their present duty.

It is for this reason also that the genders, declensions, and variations of nouns and verbs have been taught in verse, by those who have complied with the prejudice of long custom, to teach English children the Latin tongue by rules written in Latin: and truly those rude heaps of words and terminations of an unknown tongue would have never been so happily learned by heart by a hundred thousand boys without this smoothing artifice; nor indeed do I know any thing else can be said with good reason, to excuse or relieve the obvious absurdities of this practice.

When you would remember new things or words, endeavour to associate and connect them with some words

or things which you have well known before, and which are fixed and established in your memory. This association of ideas is of great importance and force, and may be of excellent use in many instances of human life. One idea which is familiar to the mind, connected with others which are new and strange, will bring those new ideas into easy remembrance. Maronides had got the first hundred lines of Virgil's Æneis printed upon his memory so perfectly, that he knew not only the order and number of every word but each verse also; and by this means he would undertake to remember two or three hundred names of persons or things, by some rational or fantastic connexion between some word in the verse, and some letter, syllable, property, or accident of the name or thing to be remembered, even though they had been repeated but once or twice at most in his hearing. Animato practised much the same art of memory, by getting the Latin names of twenty-two animals into his head according to the alphabet, viz. asinus, basiliscus, canis, draco, elephas, felis, gryfus, hircus, juvencus, leo, mulus, noctua, ovis, panthera, quadrupes, rhinoceros, simia, taurus, ursus, xiphias, hyana or yana, zibetta. Most of these he divided also into four parts, viz. head and body, feet, fins, or wings, and tail, and by some arbitrary or chimerical attachments of each of these to a word or thing, which he desired to remember, he committed them to the care of his memory, and that with good success.

It is also by this association of ideas that we may better imprint any new idea upon the memory by joining with it some circumstance of the time, place, company, &c. wherein we first observed, heard, or learned it. If we would recover an absent idea, it is useful to recollect those circumstances of time, place, &c. The substance will many times be recovered and brought to the thoughts by recollecting the shadow: a man recurs to our fancy by remembering his garment, his size or stature, his office or employment, &c. A beast, bird, or fish, by its colour, figure, or motion, by the cage, court-yard, or cistern wherein it was kept.

To this head also we may refer that remembrance of names and things which may be derived from our recol

lection of their likeness to other things which we know ; either their resemblance in name, character, form, accident, or any thing that belongs to them. An idea or word which has been lost or forgotten, has been often recovered by hitting upon some other kindred word or idea which has the nearest resemblance to it, and that in the letters, syllables, or sound of the name, as well as properties of the thing.

If we would remember Hippocrates, or Galen, or Paracelsus, think of a physician's name beginning with H, G, or P. If we will remember Ovidius Naso, we may represent a man with a large nose; if Plato, we may think upon a person with large shoulders; if Crispus, we shall fancy another with curled hair; and so of other things.

And sometimes a new or strange idea may be fixed in the memory by considering its contrary or opposite. So if we cannot hit on the word Goliath, the remembrance of David may recover it; or the name of a Trojan may be recovered by thinking of a Greek, &c.

1. In such cases wherein it may done, seek after a local memory, or a remembrance of what you have read by the side or page of where it is written or printed; whether the right or the left, whether at the top, the middle, or the bottom; whether at the beginning of a chapter or a paragraph, or the end of it. It has been some advantage, for this reason, to accustom one's self to books of the same edition and it has been of constant and special use to divines and private Christians to be furnished with several Bibles of the same edition, that wheresoever they are, whether in their chamber, parlour, or study, in the younger or elder years of life, they may find the chapters and verses standing in the same parts of the page.

This is also a great conveniency to be observed by printers, in the new editions of grammars, psalms, Testaments, &c. to print every chapter, paragraph, or verse, in the same part of the page as the former, that so it may yield an happy assistance to those young learners who find, and even feel the advantage of a local memory.

2. Let every thing we desire to remember be fairly and distinctly written, and divided into periods, with large characters in the beginning, for by this means we shall