It is maintained by many psychologists that if an impression is once made upon the memory, it remains for ever. And it is undoubted that there are certain seasons of life or certain circumstances when memory is peculiarly susceptible, and when the impressions made are deep and sharp and definite. The objects familiar in childhood and youth, the texts, the hymns, and lessons then mastered become a lifelong bequest; the memory has petrified them on its tablet for ever. Sometimes the memory is in a state of spontaneous receptivity, and without any trouble on the part of the subject, the mind retains its interesting objects for years, perhaps through the whole life.

Memory develops in every sound mind almost as early as the powers of observation; and the objects about which it is employed in the earlier stage are much alike in all individuals. But very early we discern a difference in the natural affinities: one youthful reminiscent evinces a talent in finding his way to the infant school; whilst a bewildered companion of the same class uses leading-strings.

In glancing through the records of all ages and all nations, we meet with certain individuals who have been celebrated for their extraordinary powers of memory; and some of these would appear to us so wonderful, that we are tempted to disbelieve them, and place them in the list of human impossibilities. But it cannot be denied that there are numberless instances upon record, both ancient and modern, and also in our own day, of persons retaining an almost incredible recollection of a great diversity of matters, consisting in some cases of long lists of dates and names, or in others, countenances and circumstances, long since forgotten by the majority of mankind, through a lapse of time intervening.

We propose in this paper to submit to the reader a few of the many most authentic examples of retentive memory on record.

Within the range of their own experience, many of our readers must have noticed examples of quick or retentive memory. Frequently, however, these powerful memories are filled with matters of questionable value. Of such we may mention an individual well known in London by the name of 'Memory-Corner Thompson,' who was remarkable for an astonishing local memory. In the space of twenty-four hours and at two sittings, he drew from memory a correct plan of the whole parish of St James. This plan contained all the squares, streets, lanes, courts, passages, markets, churches, chapels, houses, stables, angles of houses; and a great number of other objects, as wells, parapets, stones, trees, &c., and an exact plan of Carlton House and St James's Palace. He made out also an exact plan of the parish of St Andrew; and he offered to do the same with that of St Giles, St Paul, Covent Garden, St Clement, and Newchurch. If a particular house in any given street was mentioned, he would tell at once what trade was carried on in it, the position and appearance of the shop, and its contents. In going through a large hotel completely furnished, he was able to retain everything and make an inventory from memory. He possessed a most mechanical memory; and he could, by reading a newspaper overnight, repeat the whole of it next morning. He died in February 1843, at the age of eighty-six. Mr Paxton Hood knew a man in London who could repeat the whole of Josephus; and William Lyon, like Thompson, could read the Daily Advertiser overnight, and repeat it word for word next morning.

As a contrast to this, on the other hand we know an individual who travelled through a considerable extent of country, and passed through several towns he had visited before, yet was ignorant of the fact until informed of it by another traveller!

Pliny, in the seventh book of his Natural History, makes mention of one Charmidas or Charmadas, a native of Greece, who was the possessor of so singular a memory that he was able to deliver word for word the entire contents of any book which might be called out of a library, without having read it. This, however, we should be inclined to take cum grano salis.

Some cases are quoted of persons having a remarkable gift of learning any number of foreign languages in an incredibly short time. Mithridates king of Pontus had an empire in which two-and-twenty languages were spoken; yet it is asserted that he had not a subject with whom he could not converse in his own dialect. But in later times the royal linguist has been eclipsed by the late Cardinal Mezzofanti, who died in 1849. He had a wonderful memory for the retention of words, and with a grammatical intuition which has never been property explained, he went on acquiring languages, till at the age of seventy he could converse in upwards of fifty, besides having an acquaintance with at least twenty more. He was at home in both of the dialects of the Basque language, the most difficult in Europe; also in the different dialects of German; with Englishmen he never misapplied the sign of a tense. Besides the foregoing, he was so far master of at least one Chinese dialect that he delivered a set speech to Chinese students at the Vatican. So conversant was he with all the dialects of each tongue that he could at once detect the particular county, province, or district to which a speaker belonged. He himself was upon several occasions mistaken for a native of totally different countries. According to his own words, as related to his friend Cardinal Wiseman, his method of studying a new language was to read straight through the grammar, and when he had arrived at the end he was master of the whole. He never forgot anything he had once heard or read.

Sir William Jones, in spite of his many duties as a legal student, had before his death acquired so intimate a knowledge of fourteen languages, that he translated from the most difficult and obscure. Dr Alexander Murray, the learned author of The History of European Languages, was another of Britain's greatest linguists, who remembered every word he ever read; he had the whole of Milton by heart. The Emperor Claudius was another great memorist, also repeating by heart the Iliad and Odyssey.

It is recorded of Dr Leyden the distinguished oriental scholar, that when at Calcutta, a case occurred in which it was necessary, before deciding the issue, to know the exact wording of an act of parliament, of which, however, a copy could not be found in the Presidency. Leyden had had occasion before leaving home to read the act, and undertook to supply it from memory; and when nearly a year afterwards a printed copy was obtained from England, it was found to be identical with what Leyden had dictated.

Richard Porson had a remarkable memory. Being one day in the shop of Priestly the bookseller, a gentleman came in and asked for a particular edition of Demosthenes. Priestly did not possess it; and as the gentleman seemed a good deal disappointed, Porson inquired if he wished to consult any particular passage. The gentleman mentioned a quotation of which he was in search, when Porson opened the Aldine edition of Demosthenes, and after turning over a few leaves, put his finger on the passage. On another occasion he happened to be in a stage-coach; presently there entered into it a young undergraduate with two ladies. This young gentleman endeavoured to make himself seem very learned; presently quoting a Greek passage, which he said was from Euripides. The great Greek scholar, who was dozing at the other end of the coach, awoke at the familiar sounds, and drawing a copy of Euripides from the folds of his cloak, politely asked him to favour him with the passage. The student could not; and the ladies began to titter. Reddening, the youth said that on second thoughts, the passage he was sure was in Sophocles. Porson thereupon produced a copy of Sophocles, and again asked him to favour him with the passage. The undergraduate again failed; the ladies tittered greatly. 'Catch me!' said he, 'if ever I quote Greek in a coach again.' Stung by the laughter of his fellow-passengers, he said: 'I recollect now, sir; I perfectly recollect that the passage is in Æschylus.' His inexorable tormentor, diving again in the capacious folds of his cloak, produced a copy of Æschylus, and again asked him to favour him with the passage. The boiling-point was now reached. 'Stop! stop!' shouted he to the coachman. 'Let me out! There is a man inside who has got the whole Bodleian library in his pocket!' On another occasion, calling upon a friend, Porson found him reading Thucydides. Being asked casually the meaning of some word, he immediately repeated the context. 'But how do you know that it was this passage I was reading?' asked his friend. 'Because,' replied Porson, 'the word only occurs twice in Thucydides; once on the right-hand page in the edition which you are now using, and once on the left. I observed on which side you looked, and accordingly I knew to which passage you referred.'

Once when in the house of Dr Burney at Hammersmith, with some friends, examining some old newspapers which detailed the execution of Charles I., he came across various particulars thought by some of them to have been overlooked by Rapin and Hume; but Porson instantly repeated a long passage from Rapin in which these circumstances were all recounted. Upon one occasion he undertook to learn by heart the entire contents of the Morning Chronicle in a week; and he used to say he could repeat Roderick Random from beginning to end. His stupendous memory, however, on account of his excesses, failed at last.

Dr Thomas Fuller, the worthy historian and divine, was said to have been able to repeat five hundred and nine strange names correctly after having twice heard them; and he was known to make use of a sermon verbatim if he once heard it. He once undertook to name exactly backwards and forwards every shop-sign from Temple Bar to the extremity of Cheapside, on both sides of the way—a feat of no ordinary magnitude, when we consider that in his day every house had its sign.

'Memory' Thompson boasted he could remember every shop from Ludgate Hill to the end of Piccadilly; and another person who had earned for himself the prefix of 'Memory' was William Woodfall, the printer of the famous Letters of Junius, who used to relate how he could put a speech away upon a shelf in his mind for future reference; and he was known to be able to remember a debate for a fortnight, after many nights' speaking upon other matters.

Dr Johnson was in the habit of writing abridged reports of debates for the Gentleman's Magazine from memory.

Two noted frequenters of the Chapter Coffee-House in Paternoster Row, in the last century, were Murray and Hammond. Murray had read through every morning and evening paper published in London for thirty years, and his memory was such that he was always applied to for dates and facts by literary men and others.

Jedediah Buxton, who resided for some weeks at St John's Gate Clerkenwell, in 1754, had such a memory that 'he could conduct the most intricate calculations by his memory alone, and such was his power of abstraction that no noise could disturb him.' Singular to relate, he never learned to read or write, though he was the son of a schoolmaster.

Eugenia Jullian, a precocious child, well known to the writer of this, at the age of five years had a book given her to read; and looking through it, she at length read a poem of several hundred lines (it must be mentioned she knew her alphabet at eleven months old, and could read at three years of age) once through; and being asked what she had read, she handed her mother the book, and repeated the whole without a mistake. Unfortunately, like most precocious children, her mind proved too powerful for a delicate constitution, and she died at an early age.

Among other possessors of very retentive memories may be mentioned the learned Pope Clement VI.; Dr Monsey, who died at Chelsea at the age of ninety-five; and Mozart, who almost in every case composed his pieces before he committed them to paper.

At the present time, Elihu Burritt possesses a remarkable memory. Born in America in 1811, he had, at the age of twenty-seven, and while working at his trade, learned fifty languages. In 1846 he came to England, and was for some time United States consul at Birmingham. Gustave DorÉ is the owner of a good memory; and we have it from a reliable authority, that Thomas Carlyle, 'the philosopher of Chelsea,' lays a book aside when he has read it, it being of no more use to him, having abstracted and stored up in his mind all the contents which he deems worthy of retention.

Every one has a memory, but every one has not the same natural affinities, and therefore every one does not retain with equal facility the same sort of thing. One man, from taking a glance at an object, will sketch it correctly; another could not give a correct representation were he to labour for a month. The mind of another is more for living objects, and like Cuvier or Knox, he carries in his memory the names and forms of hundreds of plants and animals. A third has a propensity for the faces of his fellow-creatures, and like Themistocles, he can name each of the twenty thousand of his fellow-citizens; or like Cyrus, he could remember the name of every soldier in his army; the like being related of L. Scipio and the Romans. The day following the arrival of Cinaes, ambassador of King Pyrrhus, in Rome, he saluted by name all the senate and the gentlemen of the city. Our own George III. had an extraordinary power of recollecting faces. The taste of a fourth is for languages, and like Mezzofanti or Alexander Murray, every word he hears or reads in a foreign tongue becomes a lifelong heritage. Another retains mathematics, the symbols of which require a peculiar cast of memory. Such a mind is generally destitute of love of colour, music, &c.; it wrestles with the artificial symbols that express the most extensively important truths of the world. The natural history memory has to do with artificial symbols, but with these it mixes the consideration of actual appearances to the senses. The taste of another is for choice, emphatic, and sublime diction; like Wakefield, he can repeat the whole of Virgil and Horace, Homer and Pindar.

The faculty of recollecting places is very large in some of the inferior animals; pigeons and some sorts of dogs have it very prominently. The falcon of Iceland returns to its native spot from a distance of several thousands of miles. And it seems likely that this has at least something to do with reference to those birds which migrate from one country to another. It seems indispensable to a successful traveller. Columbus, Cook, Park, and Livingstone must have been largely endowed with this faculty. These diversities have not been sufficiently kept in view in the important business of education, and the principle of cramming the same things into every sort of memory still too extensively prevails.

The memory may be strong where the intellect is weak; but without the former faculty there can be no intellectual growth; for is not memory the power of the mind by which it retains its possessions? If Sensation, Perception, and Attention are the collecting faculties, Memory is 'the conservative faculty'—the retainer of the collected treasures.

With the power of throwing our whole mental vigour into any given act for the time being, a strong will can generally insure a strong memory; and for understanding then and retaining afterwards, half an hour of such absorption and concentration is worth more than the longest day of day-dreaming—though day-dreaming, as an occasional relaxation, is not to be despised.

Nowadays we are not at all surprised to see placarded about our towns large announcements of an 'eminent professor' about to arrive, under whose tuition we may be initiated into the 'Art of Memory,' whereby we may be taught to remember at will the heights of mountains, rows of dates, chronological events, and all things coming within the range of memory. It may be interesting to learn that this is no new art, for by reference to Pliny we find that the Art of Memory was invented by Simonides des Melicus, and afterwards perfected by Metrodorus Sepsius, 'by which a man might learne to rehearse againe the same words of any discourse whatsoever after once hearing.'

It does not fall within the scope of this paper to enter upon the merits or demerits of this art; but we may conveniently bring our subject to a close by relating a couple of anecdotes that bear upon it.

Upon one occasion, Fuller said: 'None alive ever heard me pretend to the art of memory, who in my book have decried it as a trick, no art; and indeed, is more fancy than memory. I confess, some years since, when I came out of the pulpit of St Dunstan's East, one (who since wrote a book thereof) told me in the vestry, before credible people, that he, in Sidney College, had taught me the art of memory. I returned unto him: That it was not so, for I could not remember that I had ever seen him before! which I conceive was a real refutation.'

Not very long ago, a lecturer upon the art of memory, whilst dining at an hotel in one of our provincial towns, was inquired for and called away suddenly; upon which he immediately finished his repast and hurried from the room. A moment or two afterwards, the waiter coming round to the chair lately occupied by the professor, held up his hands and exclaimed in astonishment: 'Goodness gracious, the memory man has forgotten his umbrella!'