Coleridge assuring me, as a poetical and political set-off to my skeptical admiration, that Wordsworth had written an "Essay on Marriage," which, for manly thought and nervous expression, he deemed incomparably superior. As I had not, at that time, seen any specimens of Mr. Wordsworth's prose style I could not express my doubts on the subject. If there are greater prose writers than Burke, they either lie out of my course of study or are beyond my sphere of comprehension. I am too old to be a convert to a new mythology of genius. The niches are occupied, the tables are full. If such is still my admiration of this man's misapplied powers, what must it have been at a time when I myself was in vain trying, year after year, to write a single essay, nay, a single page or sentence; when I regarded the wonders of his pen with the longing eyes of one who was dumb and a changeling; and when to be able to convey the slightest conception of my meaning to others in words was the height of an almost hopeless ambition. But I never measured others' excellences by my own defects, tho a sense of my own incapacity and of the steep, impassable ascent from me to them made me regard them with greater awe and fondness.

I have thus run through most of my early studies and favorite authors, some of whom I have since criticized more at large. Whether those observations will survive me I neither

know nor do I much care; but to the works themselves, "worthy of all acceptation," and to the feelings they have always excited in me since I could distinguish a meaning in language, nothing shall ever prevent me from looking back with gratitude and triumph. To have lived in the cultivation of an intimacy wtih such works, and to have familiarly relished such names, is not to have lived quite in vain.

There are other authors whom I have never read, and yet whom I have frequently had a great desire to read from some circumstance relating to them. Among these is Lord Clarendon's "History of the Grand Rebellion" after which I have a hankering from hearing it spoken of by good judges, from my interest in the events and knowledge of the characters from other sources, and from having seen fine portraits of most of them. I like to read a well-penned character, and Clarendon is said to have been a master in this way. I should like to read Froissart's "Chronicles," Holinshed and Stowe, and Fuller's "Worthies." I intend, whenever I can, to read Beaumont and Fletcher all through. There are fifty-two of their plays, and I have only read a dozen or fourteen of them. "A Wife for a Month" and "Thierry and Theodoret" are, I am told, delicious, and I can believe it. I should like to read the speeches in Thucydides, and Guicciardini's "History of Florence, and "Don

Quixote" in the original.

I have often thought of reading "The Loves of Persiles and Sigismunda" and the "Galatea" of the same author. But I somehow reserve them, like "another Yarrow." I should also like to read the last new novel (if I could be sure it was so) of the author of "Waverley"; no one would be more glad than I to find it the best.

MEMORY

BY JOHN LOCKE

Attention and repetition help much to the fixing any ideas in the memory; but those which naturally at first make the deepest and most lasting impression are those which are accompanied with pleasure or pain. The great business of the senses being to make us take notice of what hurts or advantages the body, it is wisely ordered by nature that pain should accompany the reception of several ideas; which supplying the place of consideration and reasoning in children, and acting quicker than consideration in grown men, makes both the old and young avoid painful objects, with that haste which is necessary for their preservation; and, in both, settles in the memory a caution for the future.

Concerning the several degrees of lasting, wherewith ideas are imprinted on the memory, we may observe, that some of them have been

produced in the understanding by an object affecting the senses once only, and no more than once; others that have more than once offered themselves to the senses, have yet been taken little notice of; the mind, either heedless, as in children, or otherwise employed, as in men, intent only on one thing, not setting the stamp deep into itself. And in some, where they are set on with care and repeated impressions, either through the temper of the body, or some other fault, the memory is very weak. In all these cases ideas in the mind quickly fade, and often vanish quite out of the understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters of themselves than shadows do flying over fields of corn; and the mind is as void of them as if they had never been there.

The memory of some, it is true, is very tenacious, even to a miracle; but yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas, even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen. Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs, to which we are approaching, where, tho the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions

are effaced by time, and the imagery molders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colors, and, if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of our bodies and the make of our animal spirits are concerned in this, and whether the temper of the brain makes this difference, that in some it retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better than sand, I shall not here inquire, tho it may seem probable that the constitution of the body does sometimes influence the memory, since we oftentimes find a disease quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few days calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed to be as lasting as if graved in marble. .

Memory, in an intellectual creature, is necessary in the next degree to perception. It is of so great moment, that where it is wanting all the rest of our faculties are in a great measure useless, and we in our thoughts, reasonings, and knowledge could not proceed beyond present objects, were it not for the assistance of our memories, wherein there may be two defects.

First, that it loses the idea quite, and so far it produces perfect ignorance. For since we can know nothing farther than we have the idea of it, when that is gone we are in perfect ignorance.