easures. They value knowledge, which is _useful_ and
_agreeable_ to them, as highly as we do; but they consider only the
present, and we take the future into our estimate. Children feel no
interest in half the things that are committed, with the most solemn
recommendations, to the care of their memory. It is in vain to tell
them, "You must remember _such a thing_, because it will be useful to
you when you grow up to be a man." The child feels like a child, and
has no idea of what he may feel when he grows up to be a man. He
tries to remember what he is desired, perhaps, because he wishes to
please his wiser friends; but if the ideas are remote from his every
day business, if nothing recall them but voluntary exertion, and if he
be obliged to abstract his little soul from every thing it holds dear,
before he can recollect his lessons, they will have no hold upon his
memory; he will feel that recollection is too operose, and he will
enjoy none of the "pleasures of memory."

To induce children to exercise their memory, we must put them in
situations where they may be immediately rewarded for their exertion.
We must create an interest in their minds--nothing uninteresting is
long remembered. In a large and literary family, it will not be
difficult to invent occupations for children which may exercise all
their faculties. Even the conversation of such a family, will create
in their minds a desire for knowledge; what they hear, will recall to
their memory what they read; and if they are encouraged to take a
reasonable share in conversation, they will acquire the habit of
listening to every thing that others say. By permitting children to
talk freely of what they read, we are more likely to improve their
memory for books, than by exacting from them formal repetitions of
lessons.

Dr. Johnson, who is said to have had an uncommonly good memory, tells
us, that when he was a boy, he used, after he had acquired any fresh
knowledge from his books, to run and tell it to an old woman, of whom
he was very fond. This exercise was so agreeable to him, that it
imprinted what he read upon his memory.

La Gaucherie, one of the preceptors of Henry IV. having found that he
had to do with a young prince of an impatient mind, and active genius,
little suited to sedentary studies, instead of compelling his pupil to
read, taught him by means of conversation: anecdotes of heroes, and
the wise sayings of ancient philosophers, were thus imprinted