re yet many who believe, that a superior degree of memory is
essential to the successful exercise of the higher faculties, such as
judgment and invention. The degree in which it is useful to those
powers, has not, however, been determined. Those who are governed in
their opinions by precedent and authority, can produce many learned
names, to prove that memory was held in the highest estimation amongst
the great men of antiquity; it was cultivated with much anxiety in
their public institutions, and in their private education. But there
were many circumstances, which formerly contributed to make a great
memory essential to a great man. In civil and military employments,
amongst the ancients, it was in a high degree requisite. Generals were
expected to know by heart the names of the soldiers in their armies;
demagogues, who hoped to please the people, were expected to know the
names of all their fellow-citizens.[39] Orators, who did not speak
extempore, were obliged to get their long orations by rote. Those who
studied science or philosophy, were obliged to cultivate their memory
with incessant care, because, if they frequented the schools for
instruction, they treasured up the sayings of the masters of different
sects, and learned their doctrines only by oral instruction.
Manuscripts were frequently got by heart by those who were eager to
secure the knowledge they contained, and who had not opportunities of
recurring to the originals. It is not surprising, therefore, that
memory, to which so much was trusted, should have been held in such
high esteem.

At the revival of literature in Europe, before the discovery of the
art of printing, it was scarcely possible to make any progress in the
literature of the age, without possessing a retentive memory. A man
who had read a few manuscripts, and could repeat them, was a wonder,
and a treasure: he could travel from place to place, and live by his
learning; he was a circulating library to a nation, and the more books
he could carry in his head, the better: he was certain of an admiring
audience if he could repeat what Aristotle or Saint Jerome had
written; and he had far more encouragement to engrave the words of
others on his memory, than to invent or judge for himself.

In the twelfth century, above six hundred scholars assembled in the
forests of Champagne, to hear the lectures of the learned Abeillard;
they made themselves huts of the boughs of trees, and in this new
academ