fancied to sound unpolite or unfashionable: but Archbishop Tillotson did not think so in his days.

4. A frequent review and careful repetition of the things! we would learn, and an abridgement of them in a narrow compass for this end, has a great influence to fix them in the memory therefore it is, that the rules of grammar, and useful examples of the variation of words, and the peculiar forms of speech in any language, are so often appointed by the master as lessons for the scholars to be frequently repeated; and they are contracted into tables for frequent review, that what is not fixed in the mind at first may be stamped upon the memory by a perpetual survey and rehearsal.

Repetition is so very useful a practice, that Mnemon, even from his youth to his old age, never read a book without making some small points, dashes, or hooks in the margin to mark what parts of the discourse were proper for a review: and when he came to the end of a section or chapter, he always shut his book, and recollected all the sentiments or expressions he had remarked, so that he could give a tolerable analysis and abstract of every treatise he had read, just after he had finished it. Thence he became so well furnished with a rich variety of knowledge. Even when a person is hearing a sermon or a lecture, he may give his thoughts leave now and then to step back so far as to recollect the several heads of it from the beginning, two or three times before the lecture or sermon is finished the omission or the loss of a sentence or two among the amplifications is richly compensated by preserving in the mind the method and order of the whole discourse in the most important branches of it.

:

If we would fix in the memory the discourses we hear, or what we design to speak, let us abstract them into brief compends, and review them often. Lawyers and divines have need of such assistances: they write down short notes or hints of the principal heads of what they desire to commit to their memory, in order to preach or plead; for such

abstracts

abstracts and epitomes may be reviewed much sooner, and the several amplifying sentiments or sentences will be more easily invented or recollected in their proper places. The art of short-hand is of excellent use for this as well as other purposes. It must be acknowledged that those who scarcely ever take a pen in their hands to write short notes or hints of what they are to speak or learn, who never try to cast things into method, or to contract the survey of them, in order to commit them to their memory, had need to have a double degree of that natural power of retaining and recollecting what they read or hear, or intend to speak.

Do not plunge yourself into other businesses or studies, amusements or recreations, immediately after you have attended upon instruction, if you can well avoid it. Get time, if possible, to recollect the things you have heard, that they may not be washed all away from the mind by a torrent of other occurrences or engagements, nor lost in the crowd or clamour of other loud and importunate affairs.

Talking over the things which you have read with your companions, on the first proper opportunity you have for it, is a most useful manner of review or repetition, in order to fix them upon the mind. Teach them your younger friends in order to establish your own knowledge while you communicate it to them. The animal powers of your tongue and of your ear, as well as your intellectual faculties, will all join together to help the memory. Hermetas studied hard in a remote corner of the land, and in solitude, yet he became a very learned man. He seldom was so happy as to enjoy suitable society at home, and therefore he talked over to the fields and the woods in the evening what he had been reading in the day, and found so considerable advantage by this practice, that he recommended it to all his friends, since he could set his probatum to it for seventeen years.

5. Pleasure and delight in the things we learn gives great assistance towards the remembrance of them. Whatsoever, therefore, we desire that a child should commit to his me

mory,

mory, make it as pleasant to him as possible; endeavour to search his genius and his temper; and let him take in the instructions you give him, or the lessons you appoint him, as far as may be in a way suited to his natural inclination. Fabellus would never learn any moral lessons till they were moulded into the form of some fiction or fable like those of Æsop, or till they put on the appearance of a parable, like those wherein our blessed Saviour taught the ignorant world: then he remembered well the emblematical instructions that were given him, and learnt to practise the moral sense and meaning of them. Young Spectorius was taught virtue, by setting before him a variety of examples of the various good qualities in human life; and he was appointed daily to repeat some story of this kind out of Valerius Maximus. The same lad was early instructed to avoid the common vices and follies of youth in the same manner. This is a-kin to the method whereby the Lacedæmonians trained up their children to hate drunkenness and intemperance, viz. by bringing a drunken man into their company, and shewing them what a beast he had made of himself. Such visible and sensible forms of instruction will make long and useful impressions upon the memory.

Children may be taught to remember many things in a way of sport and play. Some young creatures have learnt their letters and syllables, and the pronouncing and spelling of words, by having them pasted or written upon many little flat tables or dies. Some have been taught vocabularies of different languages, having a word on one tongue written on one side of these tablets, and the same word in another tongue on the other side of them.

There might be also many entertaining contrivances for the instruction of children in several things relating to geometry, geography, and astronomy, in such alluring and lusory methods, which would make a most agreeable and lasting impression on their minds.

6. The memory of useful things may receive considerable aid if they are thrown into verse: for the numbers and mea

sures, and rhyme, according to the poesy of different languages, have a considerable influence upon mankind, both to make them receive with more ease the things proposed to their observation, and preserve them longer in their remembrance. How many are there of the common affairs of human life, which have been taught in early years by the help of rhyme, and have been like nails fastened in a sure place, and rivetted by daily use?

So the number of the days of each month are engraven on the memory of thousands by these four lines:

Thirty days have September,
June, April, and November:
February twenty-eight alone,

And all the rest have thirty-one.

So lads have been taught frugality by surveying and judging of their own expences by these three lines :

Compute the pence but of one day's expence
So many pounds and angels, groats and pence,
Are spent in one whole year's circumference.

For the number of days in a year is three hundred and sixty-five, which number of pence makes one pound, one angel, one groat, and one penny.

So have rules of health been prescribed in the book called Schola Salernitana, and many a person has preserved himself doubtless from evening gluttony, and the pains and diseases consequent upon it, by these two lines:

And a hundred proverbial sentences in various languages are formed into rhyme or a verse, whereby they are made to stick upon the memory of old and young.

It is from this principle that moral rules have been cast into a poetic mould from all antiquity. So the golden verses of the Pythagoreans in Greck; Cato's distiches De Moribus in Latin; Lilly's precepts to scholars, called Qui mihi, with many others; and this has been done with very good success. A line or two of this kind, recurring on the memory, have often guarded youth from a temptation to vice and folly, as well as put them in mind of their present duty.

It is for this reason also that the genders, declensions, and variations of nouns and verbs have been taught in verse by those who have complied with the prejudice of long custom, to teach English children the Latin tongue by rules written in Latin: and truly those rude heaps of words and terminations of an unknown tongue would have never been so happily learnt by heart by a hundred thousand boys without this smoothing artifice; nor indeed do I know any thing else that can be said with good reason to excuse or relieve the obvious absurdities of this practice.

7. When you would remember new things or words, endeavour to associate and connect them with some words or things which you have well known before, and which are fixed and established in your memory. This association of ideas is of great importance and force, and may be of excellent use in many instances of human life. One idea, which is familiar to the mind, connected with others which are new and strange, will bring those new ideas into easy remembrance. Maronides had got the first hundred lines of Virgil's Æneis printed upon his memory so perfectly that he knew not only the order and number of every verse from one to a hundred in perfection, but the order and number of every word in each verse also; and by this means he would undertake to remember two or three hundred names of persons or things by some rational or fantastic connexion be