_Power of Memory._

It is indeed not easy to calculate the height to which the memory may
be cultivated. To take an ordinary case, we might refer to that of any
first-rate actor, who must be prepared, at a very short warning, to
"rhapsodize" night after night, parts which, when laid together, would
amount to an immense number of lines. But all this is nothing to two
instances of our own day. Visiting at Naples a gentleman of the highest
intellectual attainments, and who held a distinguished rank among the
men of letters in the last century, he informed us that the day before
he had passed much time in examining a man, not highly educated, who had
learned to repeat the whole Gierusalemme Liberata of Tasso; not only to
recite it consecutively, but to repeat any given stanza of any given
book; to repeat those stanzas in utter defiance of the sense, either
forwards or backwards, or from the eighth line to the first, alternately
the odd and even lines--in short, whatever the passage required, the
memory, which seemed to cling to the words much more than to the sense,
had it at such perfect command, that it could produce it under any form.
Our informant went on to state, that this singular being was proceeding
to learn the Orlando Furioso in the same manner. But even this instance
is less wonderful than one as to which we may appeal to any of our
readers that happened some twenty years ago to visit the town of
Stirling, in Scotland. No such person can have forgotten that poor,
uneducated man, _Blind Jamie_, who could actually repeat, after
a few minutes' consideration, any verse required from any part of the
Bible--even the obscurest and least important enumeration of mere proper
names not excepted.


_Origin of the Homeric Poems._