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 he commenced his "Spectators," had amassed three folios of materials.

But the higher step will be the volume which shall give an account of a man to himself, in which a single observation immediately becomes a clue of past knowledge, restoring to him his lost studies, and his evanescent existence.