plished--to prove which
accomplishment we must suppose some little time over and above the 776
to have elapsed--then this surplus, were it but a single hour, throws us
at once into the 777th year. This was, in fact, the oversight which
misled a class of disputants, whom I hope the reader is too young to
remember, but whom I, alas! remember too well in the year 1800. They
imagined and argued that the eighteenth century closed upon the first
day of the year 1800. New Year's Day of the year 1799, they understood
as the birthday of the Christian Church, proclaiming it to be then 1799
years old, not as commencing its 1799th year. And so on. Pye, the Poet
Laureate of that day, in an elaborate preface to a secular ode, argued
the point very keenly. It is certain (though not evident at first sight)
that in the year 1839 the Christian period of time is not, as children
say, '_going of_' 1840, but going of 1839: whereas the other party
contend that it is in its 1840th year, tending in short to become that
which it will actually be on its birthday, _i.e._, on the calends of
January, or _le Jour de l'an_, or New Year's Day of 1840.

[33] See note immediately preceding on previous page.

[34] '_With impunity._'--There is no one point in which I have found a
more absolute coincidence of opinion amongst all profound thinkers,
English, German, and French, when discussing the philosophy of
education, than this great maxim--_that the memory ought never to be
exercised in a state of insulation_, that is, in those blank efforts of
its strength which are accompanied by no law or logical reason for the
thing to be remembered; by no such reason or principle of dependency as
could serve to recall it in after years, when the burthen may have
dropped out of the memory. The reader will perhaps think that I, the
writer of this little work, have a pretty strong and faithful memory,
when I tell him that every word of it, with all its details, has been
written in a situation which sternly denied me the use of books bearing
on my subject. A few volumes of rhetorical criticism and of polemic
divinity, that have not, nor, to my knowledge, could have furnished me
with a solitary fact or date, are all the companions of my solitude.
Other voice than the voice of the wind I have rarely heard. Even my
quotations are usually from memory, though not always, as one out of
three, perhaps, I had fortunately written down in a pocket-book; but no
one date or fact