In the case of works of history and fiction, which adopt the narrative tense, this tendency to a subsequent illusion of memory is strengthened by the disposition of the mind at the moment of reading to project itself backwards as in an act of recollection.

This is a point which will be further dealt with in the next chapter.
In most cases, however, illusions of memory growing out of previous activities of the imagination appear only after the lapse of some time, when in the natural course of things the mental images derived from actual experience would sink to a certain degree of faintness.

Habitual novel-readers often catch themselves mistaking the echo of some passage in a good story for the trace left by an actual event.

A person's name, a striking saying, and even an event itself, when we first come across it or experience it, may for a moment seem familiar to us, and to recall some past like impression, if it only happens to resemble something in the works of a favourite novelist.

And so, too, any recital of another's experience, whether oral or literary, if it deeply interests us and awakens a specially vivid imagination of the events described, may easily become the starting-point of an illusory recollection.
Children are in the habit of "drinking in" with their vigorous and eager imaginations what is told them and read to them, and hence they are specially likely to fall into this kind of error.