CHAPTER XVII. 129 Englished : To be easy an night Let your supper be light: Or else you'll complain Of a stomach in pain. And a hundred proverbial sentences in various languages are formed into rhyme or a verse, whereby they are made to stick upon the memory of old and young. It is from this prin- ciple that moral rules have been cast into a poetic mould from all antiquity. So the golden verses of the Pythagoreans in Gireek; Cato's Distichs De Moribus in Latin ; Lilly's precepts to scho- lars calledQui mihi, with manyothers ; and this has been done with very good success. A line or twoof this kind recurring on the memory, have often guarded youth from a temptation to vice andfolly, as well as put them in mind of their present duty. It is for this reason also that the genders, declensions, and variations of nouns and verbs have been taught in verse, by those who have complied with the prejudice of long custom, to teach English children the Latin tongue by rules written in La- tin : and truly those rude heaps of words and terminations of an unknown tongue, would have never been so happily learnt by heart by a hundred thousand boys without this smoothing artifice ; nor indeed do I know any thing else can be said with good reason, to excuse or relieve theobvious absurdities of this practice. When youwould remember new things or words, endeavour to associate and connect them with some words or things which you have well known before, and which are fixed and estab- lished in your memory. This association of ideas is of great importance and force, and may be of excellent usem many in- stances of human life. One ideawhich is familiar to the mind, connected with others which are new and strange, will bring those new ideas into easy remembrance. Maronides had got the first hundred lines of Virgil's "Eneis printed upon his memory so perfectly, that he knew not only the order and number of every verse from one to a hundred in perfection, but the order and.number of every word in each verse also; and by this means he would undertake to remember two or three hundred names of persons or things by some rational or fantastic- connec- tion between someword in the verse, and some letter, syllable, property, or accident of the name or thing to be remembered, even though they had been repeated but once or twice at most in his hearing. Animato practised much the same art of memory by getting the Latin namesof twenty-two animals into his head according to the alphabet, viz. asinus, basiliscus, cuttis, draco, elephas, felis, gryphus, hircus, juiencus, leo, mulus, noctua, ovis, panlhera, quadrupes, rhinoceros, simia, taurus, ursus, VOL. -viii. I
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