ten times as
well. We close our eyes whenever we would collect our mind together, or
trace more distinctly an object which seems to have faded away in our
recollection. The study of an author or an artist would be ill placed in
the midst of a beautiful landscape; the "Penseroso" of Milton, "hid from
day's garish eye," is the man of genius. A secluded and naked apartment,
with nothing but a desk, a chair, and a single sheet of paper, was for
fifty years the study of BUFFON; the single ornament was a print of Newton
placed before his eyes--nothing broke into the unity of his reveries.
Cumberland's liveliest comedy, _The West Indian_, was written in an
unfurnished apartment, close in front of an Irish turf-stack; and our
comic writer was fully aware of the advantages of the situation. "In all
my hours of study," says that elegant writer, "it has been through life my
object so to locate myself as to have little or nothing to distract my
attention, and therefore brilliant rooms or pleasant prospects I have ever
avoided. A dead wall, or, as in the present case, an Irish turf-stack, are
not attractions that can call off the fancy from its pursuits; and whilst
in these pursuits it can find interest and occupation, it wants no outward
aid to cheer it. My father, I believe, rather wondered at my choice." The
principle ascertained, the consequences are obvious.

The arts of memory have at all times excited the attention of the
studious; they open a world of undivulged mysteries, where every one seems
to form some discovery of his own, rather exciting his astonishment than
enlarging his comprehension. LE SAGE, a modern philosopher, had a memory
singularly defective. Incapable of acquiring languages, and deficient in
all those studies which depend on the exercise of the memory, it became
the object of his subsequent exertions to supply this deficiency by the
order and method he observed in arranging every new fact or idea he
obtained; so that in reality with a very bad memory, it appears that he
was still enabled to recall at will any idea or any knowledge which he had
stored up. JOHN HUNTER happily illustrated the advantages which every one
derives from putting his thoughts in writing, "it resembles a tradesman
taking stock; without which he never knows either what he possesses, or in
what he is deficient." The late WILLIAM HUTTON, a man of an original cast
of mind, as an experiment in memory, opened a book which he had divided
into