has been drawn from any source but that of my
unassisted memory. Now, this useful sanity of the memory I ascribe
entirely to the accident of my having escaped in childhood all such
mechanic exercises of the memory as I have condemned in the text--to
this accident, combined with the constant and severe practice I have
given to my memory, in working and sustaining immense loads of facts
that had been previously brought under logical laws.

[35] '_The long careering of an earthquake._'--It is remarkable, and was
much noticed at the time by some German philosophers, that the
earthquake which laid Lisbon in ruins about ninety-five years ago, could
be as regularly traced through all its stages for some days previous to
its grand _finale_, as any thief by a Bow Street officer. It passed
through Ireland and parts of England; in particular it was dogged
through a great part of Leicestershire; and its rate of travelling was
not so great but that, by a series of telegraphs, timely notice might
have been sent southwards that it was coming. [The Lisbon earthquake
occurred in 1755; so that this paper must have been written about 1849
or 1850.--ED.]

[36] '_The exact personality._'--The historical personality, or complete
identification of an individual, lies in the whole body of circumstances
that would be sufficient to determine him as a responsible agent in a
court of justice. Archbishop Usher and others fancy that Sardanapalus
was the son of Pul; guided merely by the sound of a syllable.
Tiglath-Pileser, some fancy to be the same person as Sardanapalus;
others to be the very rebel who overthrew Sardanapalus. In short, all is
confused and murky to the very last degree. And the reader who fancies
that some accurate chronological characters are left, by which the era
of Sardanapalus can be more nearly determined than it is determined
above, viz., as generally coinciding with the era of Romulus and of the
Greek Olympiad, is grossly imposed upon.

[37] '_And Asiatic._'--_Asiatic_, let the pupil observe, and not merely
Assyrian; for the Assyria of this era represents all that was afterwards
Media, Persia, Chaldaea, Babylonia, and Syria. No matter for the exact
limits of the Assyrian empire, which are as indistinct in space as in
time. Enough that no Asiatic State is known as distinct from this
empire.

[38] And this is so exceedingly striking, that I am much surprised at
the learned disputants upon the era of Homer having failed to