s been said
in our hearing by others, or what we have read which has made a marked
impression upon us. Thus, some persons can repeat with almost exact
accuracy, every word of a long conversation held with another. Others can
repeat whole poems, or long passages in prose from favorite authors,
after reading them over two or three times, and can retain them perfectly
in memory for half a century or more. There have even been persons to
whom one single reading of any production was sufficient to enable them
to repeat it _verbatim_. These instances of a great verbal memory are by
no means rare, although some of them appear almost incredible. John Locke
tells us of the French philosopher Pascal, that he never forgot anything
of what he had done, said, or thought, in any part of his natural life.
And the same thing is recorded of that great scholar of Holland, Hugo
Grotius.

The mathematician Euler could repeat the Aeneid of Virgil from beginning
to end, containing nearly nine thousand lines. Mozart, upon hearing the
_Miserere_ of Allegri played in the Sistine Chapel at Rome, only once,
went to his hotel, and wrote it all down from memory, note for note.

Cardinal Mezzofanti both wrote and spoke thirty languages, and was quite
familiar with more than a hundred. He said that if he once heard the
meaning of a word in any language, he never forgot it. Yet he was of the
opinion, that although he had twenty words for one idea, it was better to
have twenty ideas for one word; which is no doubt true, so far as real
intellectual culture is concerned. Lord Macaulay, who had a phenomenal
memory, said that if all the copies of Milton's Paradise Lost were to be
destroyed, he could reproduce the book complete, from memory. In early
life he was a great admirer of Walter Scott's poetry, and especially the
"Lay of the Last Minstrel", and could repeat the whole of that long poem,
more than six hundred lines, from memory. And at the age of fifty-seven
he records--"I walked in the portico, and learned by heart the noble
fourth act of the Merchant of Venice. There are four hundred lines. I
made myself perfect master of the whole in two hours." It was said of him
that every incident he heard of, and every page he read, "assumed in his
mind a concrete spectral form."

But the memory for names and words has been sometimes called the lowest
form of memory. Persons of defective or impaired intellect frequently
have strong and retentive verbal memor