365 columns, according to the days of the year: he resolved to try to
recollect an anecdote, for every column, as insignificant and remote as he
was able, rejecting all under ten years of age; and to his surprise, he
filled those spaces for small reminiscences, within ten columns; but till
this experiment had been made, he never conceived the extent of his
faculty. WOLF, the German metaphysician, relates of himself that he had,
by the most persevering habit, in bed and amidst darkness, resolved his
algebraic problems, and geometrically composed all his methods merely by
the aid of his imagination and memory; and when in the daytime he verified
the one and the other of these operations, he had always found them
true. Unquestionably, such astonishing instances of a well-regulated
memory depend on the practice of its art gradually formed by frequent
associations. When we reflect that whatever we know, and whatever we feel,
are the very smallest portions of all the knowledge we have been
acquiring, and all the feelings we have experienced through life, how
desirable would be that art which should again open the scenes which have
vanished, and revivify the emotions which other impressions have effaced?
But the faculty of memory, although perhaps the most manageable of all
others, is considered a subordinate one; it seems only a grasping and
accumulating power, and in the work of genius is imagined to produce
nothing of itself; yet is memory the foundation of Genius, whenever this
faculty is associated with imagination and passion; with men of genius it
is a chronology not merely of events, but of emotions; hence they remember
nothing that is not interesting to their feelings. Persons of inferior
capacity have imperfect recollections from feeble impressions. Are not the
incidents of the great novelist often founded on the common ones of life?
and the personages so admirably alive in his fictions, were they not
discovered among the crowd? The ancients have described the Muses as the
daughters of Memory; an elegant fiction, indicating the natural and
intimate connexion between imagination and reminiscence.

The arts of memory will form a saving-bank of genius, to which it may have
recourse, as a wealth which it can accumulate imperceptibly amidst the
ordinary expenditure. LOCKE taught us the first rudiments of this art,
when he showed us how he stored his thoughts and his facts, by an
artificial arrangement; and Addison, before