We do not mention these facts as touching the more difficult part of the question before us, but facts they are; and if we find so much difficulty in calculating the extent to which the mere memory may be cultivated, are we, in these days of multifarious reading, and of countless distracting affairs, fair judges of the perfection to which the invention and the memory combined may attain in a simpler age, and among a more single minded people ?--Quarterly Review, _l.
c.,_ p.

143, sqq.
Heeren steers between the two opinions, observing that, "The Dschungariade of the Calmucks is said to surpass the poems of Homer in length, as much as it stands beneath them in merit, and yet it exists only in the memory of a people which is not unacquainted with writing.

But the songs of a nation are probably the last things which are committed to writing, for the very reason that they are remembered."-- _Ancient Greece._ p.

100.
26 Vol.

II p.