the audience before me,
but apart from vision I seemed bereft of all my faculties. If I had in that
instant been asked for my name I am doubtful whether I could have got
anywhere near it. Happily some one in a front row, thinking I was pausing
for a word, threw out a suggestion. It was like magic. I felt the machine
of memory start again with an almost audible "puff, puff," and I went on to
the end quite comfortably. The pause had seemed terribly long to me, but I
was surprised afterwards to find that it had been so brief as to be
generally unnoticed or regarded as an artful way of emphasising a point. I
let it go at that, but I knew myself that in that moment I had lost my
memory.

Even distinguished and expert orators have been known to suffer from this
absolute lapse of memory. The Rosebery incident--was it in the Chesterfield
speech?--is perhaps the best known, but I once heard Mr. Redmond, the
calmest and most assured of speakers, come to an _impasse_ in the House of
Commons that held him up literally for minutes.

We are creatures of memory, and when, as in the Keighley case, memory is
gone personality itself has gone. Nothing is left but the empty envelope.
The more fundamental functions of memory, the habits of respiration, of
walking and physical movement, of mastication, and so on, remain. The
Keighley man still eats and walks with all the knowledge of a lifetime. He
probably preserves his taste for tobacco. But these things have nothing to
do with personality. That is the product of the myriad mental impressions
that you have stored up in your pilgrimage. There is not a moment in your
life that is not charged with the significance of memory. You cannot hear
the blackbird singing in the low bough in the evening without the secret
music of summer eves long past being stirred within you. It is that
response of the inner harp of memory that gives the song its beauty. And so
everything we do and see and hear is touched with a thousand influences
which we cannot catalogue, but which constitute our veritable selves. An
old hymn tune, or an old song, a turn of phrase, a scent in the garden, a
tone of voice, a curve in the path--everything comes to us weighted with
its own treasures of memory, bitter or sweet, but always significant.

It is a mistake to suppose that memory is merely a capacity to remember
facts. In that respect there is the widest diversity of experience.
Macaulay could recite _Paradise Lost_, while