nd in a moment to enter the tropic
atmosphere of noble friendship, where are fragrance and beauty,
perpetual warmth and wealth.

It was a favorite principle with Socrates that the lesser man never
comprehends the latent strength in his reason or imagination until he
witnesses its skill in the greatest. He implies that the eloquence,
art, and skill that crown the children of genius exist in rudimentary
form in all men. In order, therefore, to understand memory in its
ordinary processes, let us consider its functions in those in whom it
is unique. Fortunately scholars in every age have preserved important
facts concerning the power of recollection. The classic orators
contain repeated reference to traveling singers, who could recite the
entire Iliad and Odyssey. In his "Declamations," speaking of the
inroads disease had made upon him, Seneca remarks that he could speak
two thousand words and names in the order read to him, and that one
morning he listened to the reading of two hundred verses of poetry,
and in the afternoon recited them in their order and without mistake.

Muretus remarks that the stories of Seneca's memory seemed to him
almost incredible, until he witnessed a still more marvelous
occurrence. The sum of his statement is that at Padua there dwelt a
young Corsican, a brilliant and distinguished student of civil law.
Having heard of his marvelous faculty of memory a company of gentlemen
requested from him an exhibition of his power. Six Venetian noblemen
were judges, though there were many other witnesses of the feat.
Muretus dictated words, Latin, Greek, barbaric, disconnected and
connected, until he wearied himself and the man who wrote them down,
and the audience who were present. Afterward the young man repeated
the entire list of words in the same order, then backward, then every
other word, then every fifth word, etc., and all without error.

Sir William Hamilton says that the librarian for the Grand Duke of
Tuscany read every book and pamphlet in his master's library and took
a mental photograph of each page. When asked where a certain passage
was to be found, he would name the alcove, shelf, book, page
containing the passage in question. Scaliger, the scholar, who has
been called the most learned man that ever lived, committed the Iliad
to memory in three weeks and mastered all the Greek poets in four
months. Ben Jonson could repeat all he had ever written and many
volumes he had read, as could Nie