I disclaim all responsibility for
this statement of my personal observation, since it has recently been
indorsed by one of London's most eminent actors.
AT the next table, taking his opal drops of absinthe, was a French
gentleman with the blase aspect of an empty champagne-bottle, which
always has the air of saying: "I have lived!"
WE often read of wonderful manifestations of memory, but they are always
instances of the faculty working in some special direction. It is memory
playing, like Paganini, on one string. No doubt the persons performing
the phenomenal feats ascribed to them have forgotten more than they
remember. To be able to repeat a hundred lines of verse after a single
reading is no proof of a retentive mind, excepting so far as the hundred
lines go. A man might easily fail under such a test, and yet have a good
memory; by which I mean a catholic one, and that I imagine to be nearly
the rarest of gifts. I have never met more than four or five persons
possessing it.
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