nd made their
own.

A quality of memory vastly more important than quickness, is tenacity.
To hold on to what we get, is the secret of mental, no less than of
pecuniary accumulations. The mind, too, like other misers, clings most
tenaciously to that which has cost it most labor. Come lightly, go
lightly, the world over. Knowledge which comes into the mind without
toil and effort, without protracted and laborious attention, is apt to
go as easily as it came.

But, by far the most important quality of memory, for the practical
purposes of life, is readiness. Like quickness and tenacity, it is to be
greatly improved, if not acquired by practice. It is in the cultivation
of this quality, that the power of a good teacher shines forth most
conspicuously. Quickness and tenacity may be cultivated by solitary
study. But readiness requires for its development a live teacher, and
the stir of the school-room and the class. Here it is that the art of
questioning shows its wonderful resources. Repeated and continued
interrogatories, judiciously worded, have a sort of talismanic power.
They oblige the scholar to bring out his knowledge from its hidden
recesses, to turn it over and over, and inside out, and upside down, to
look at it and to handle it, so that not only it becomes forever and
indestructibly his own, but he can ever afterwards use it at will with
the same readiness that he uses his hands or his eyes. This is what a
skilful teacher may do for his scholars, by a knowledge and practice of
the art of questioning. Unfortunately, teachers in general find it much
easier passively to hear a lesson, than to muster as much intellectual
energy as is necessary to ask a question.

It was a remark of Bacon's, that, if we wish to commit anything to
memory, we will accomplish more in ten readings, if at each perusal we
make the attempt to repeat it from memory, referring to the book only
when the memory fails, than we would by a hundred readings made in the
ordinary way, and without any intervening trials. The explanation of
this fact is, that each effort to recollect the passage secures to the
subsequent perusal a more intense degree of attention; and it seems to
be a law of our nature, not only that there is no memory without
attention, which I have labored at some length to establish, but that
the degree of memory is in a great measure proportioned to the degree of
the attention.

You will see at once the bearing of this fact upo