Pleasures of the Imagination.

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of the Deity. We have several instances of great men descending from the more austere pursuits to these simple but innocent pastimes. The Persian ambassadors found Agesilaus, the Lacedæmonian monarch, riding on a stick. The ambassadors found Henry the Fourth playing on the carpet with his children; and it is said that Domitian, after he had possessed himself of the Roman empire, amused himself by catching flies. Socrates, if tradition speaks truly, was partial to the recreation of riding on a wooden horse; for which, as Valerius Maximus tells us, his pupil Alcibiades laughed at him. (Is not this the origin of our rockinghorse?) Did not Archytas,

He who could scan the earth and ocean's bound,
And tell the countless sands that strew the shore,

as Horace says, invent the children's rattle? Toys have served to unbend the wise, to occupy the idle, to exercise the sedentary, and to instruct the ignorant. To come to our own times: we have heard of a Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, a man of grave years and thoughts, being surprised playing at leap-frog with his young nephews.

The same desire to unstring the bow, as old Æsop taught, impels sturdy workmen, let loose from their toil, to seek diversion in the amusements of boyhood. Often have we seen scores of men break forth from a factory or printing-office for their dinner-hour, and in great measure disport them. selves like schoolboys in a playground.

PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION LATE
IN LIFE.

Dugald Stewart, in his Essay on the Cultivation of Intellectual Habits, predicates, in persons of mature age, what may be termed the enjoyment of a second season of enjoyments far more refined than the first. Thus he says: "Instances have frequently occurred of individuals in whom the power of imagination has, at an advanced period of life, been found susceptible of culture to a wonderful degree. In such men, what an accession is gained to their most refined pleasures! What enchantments are added to their most ordinary perceptions! The mind, awakening, as if

from a trance, to a new existence, becomes habituated to the most interesting aspects of life and of nature; the intellectual eye is 'purged of its film;' and things the most familiar and unnoticed disclose charms invisible before. The same objects and events which were lately beheld with indifference occupy now all the powers and capacities of the soul, the contrast between the present and the past serving only to enhance and to endear so unlooked-for an acquisition. What Gray has so finely said of the pleasures of vicissitude conveys but a faint image of what is experienced by the man who, after having lost in vulgar occupations and vulgar amusements his earliest and most precious years, is thus introduced at last to a new heaven and a new earth:

The meanest floweret of the vale,

The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are op'ning Paradise."

Nothing can be more deplorable than a man who has outlived the likings, and perchance the innocence, of his early life; which is by no means rare, if they have not grown out of the study and love of nature, for this clings to the heart in all the vicissitudes of life,-in adversity as well as in prosperity; in sickness as well as in health; even to extreme old age, when almost every other worldly source of pleasure is dried up. Hear the testimony of Hannah More, at the age of eighty-two: "The only one of my youthful fond attachments," says she, "which exists still in full force, is a passion for scenery, raising flowers, and landscape gardening." Well indeed will it be for the young if they follow the example of this venerable woman, and early acquire a passion for scenery and flowers. For as they pass through life, they will find the world often frowning upon them, but the flowers will always smile. And it is sweet, in the day of adversity, to be met with a smile.

We remember a touching instance of the love of flowers lighting up the last hours of a botanist who had wooed nature in the picturesque vale of Mickleham, in Surrey. A few short hours before his death, he turned to his niece and said: "Mary, it is a fine morning; go and see if Scilla verna is come in flower."

The Faculty of Memory.

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WHAT IS MEMORY?

Man possesses a nervous system pervaded by a nervous force, the modification of which manifests itself to our consciousness in the varied phenomena of what we call Sensation. From Sensation, the next step is to Perception. Sensation, we know, as such, dies away from the consciousness, or rather is obliterated by fresh impressions upon the sensorium. We cannot retain a feeling in perpetuity. But when a definite sensation has been excited, or a distinct experience has been acquired, something remains behind; and upon these residua, left in the structure of the nerves, or the cerebral tissues, or the animating soul, and on the permanence of these residua, rests the whole possibility of reminiscence. Upon this blending and organisation round the centre of mind-life follows the faculty of Memory, or that power which the mind possesses of making a peculiar representation of an object for itself, of creating a special idea of it by giving greater prominence to some features, and letting others sink away unthought of, till there remains an image, the product of its own free activity, which it can mentally connect with other trains of ideas, and thus multiply, as it were, the bridges by which it can return to it at any period.* Byron has beautifully personified this paramount image: She was a form of life and light, That seen became a part of sight;

And rose, where'er I turned mine eye,
The Morning-star of Memory!

"Mere abstraction, or what is called absence of mind, is often attributed, very unphilosophically, to a want of memory. La Fontaine, in a dreaming mood, forgot his own child, and, after warmly commending him, observed how proud he should be to have such a son. In this kind of abstraction external things are either only dimly seen, or are utterly overlooked; but the memory is not necessarily asleep. In fact, its too intense activity is frequently the cause of the abstraction. This faculty is usually the

See an admirable paper on Dr. Morell's Introduction to Mental Philosophy, in Saturday Review; also Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity, for the following articles: "What is Memory?" "How the Function of Memory takes place;" "Persistence of Impressions;" "Value of Memory;" "Registration;" and "Decay of Memory;" pp. 69-75.

strongest when the other faculties are in their prime, and fades in old age, when there is a general decay of mind and body. Old men, indeed, are proverbially narrative; and from this circumstance it sometimes appears as if the memory preserves a certain portion of its early acquisitions to the last, though in the general failure of the intellect it loses its active energy. It receives no new impressions, but old ones are confirmed. The brain seems to grow harder. Old images become fixtures. It is recorded of Pascal, that, till the decay of his health had impaired his memory, he forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought in any part of his rational age. The Admirable Crichton could repeat backwards any speech he had made. Magliabecchi, the Florentine librarian, could recollect whole volumes; and once supplied an author from memory with a copy of his own work, of which the original was lost. Pope has observed that Bolingbroke had so great a memory, that if he was alone and without books he could refer to a particular subject in them, and write as fully on it as another man would with all his books about him. Woodfall's extraordinary power of reporting the debates in the House of Commons without the aid of written memoranda is well known. During a debate he used to close his eyes and lean with both hands upon his stick, resolutely excluding all extraneous associations. The accuracy and precision of his reports brought his newspaper into great repute. He would retain a full recollection of a particular debate a fortnight after it had occurred, and during the intervention of other debates. He used to say that it was put by in a corner of his mind for future reference."*

CONSOLATION IN GROWING OLD.

Montaigne said of Cicero On Old Age, "It gives one an appetite for old age." Its persuasive eloquence is the inspiration of an elevated philosophy. Flourens has cleverly said, "The moral aspect of old age is its best side. We cannot grow old without losing our physique, nor also without our morale gaining by it. This is a noble compensation."

* Literary Leaves, by D. L. Richardson.

M. Reveillé-Parise says: "In a green old age, when from fifty-five to seventy-five years, and sometimes more, the life of the mind has a scope, a consistence, and remarkable solidity, man having then truly attained to the height of his faculties."

Patience is the privilege of age. A great advantage to the man who has lived is, that he knows how to wait. Again, experience is an old man's memory.

Buffon was seventy years of age (this was young for Buffon, he lived to eighty-one) when he wrote The Epochs of Nature, in which he calls old age a prejudice. Without our arithmetic we should not, according to Buffon, know that we were old. "Animals," he says, "do not know it; it is only by our arithmetic that we judge otherwise."

Buffon having settled on his estate at Montbard, in Burgundy, there pursued his studies with such regularity that the history of one day seems to have been that of all the others through a period of fifty years. After he was dressed, he dictated letters, and regulated his domestic affairs; and at six o'clock he retired to his studies in a pavilion in his garden, about a furlong from the house. This pavilion was only furnished with a large wooden secretary and an arm-chair; and within it was another cabinet, ornamented with drawings of birds and beasts. Prince Henry of Prussia called it the cradle of natural history; and Rousseau, before he entered it, used to fall on his knees, and kiss the threshold. Here Buffon composed the greater number of his works. At nine o'clock he usually took an hour's rest; and his breakfast, a piece of bread and two glasses of wine, was brought to him. When he had written two hours after breakfast, he returned to the house. At dinner he enjoyed the gaieties and trifles of the table. After dinner he slept an hour in his room; took a solitary walk; and during the rest of the evening he either conversed with his family or guests, or examined his papers at his desk. At nine o'clock he went to bed, to prepare himself for the same routine of judgment and pleasure. He had a most fervid imagination; and his anxious solicitude for a literary immortality, "that last infirmity of noble minds," continually betrayed him to be a vain man.

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Every day that I rise in good health," said Buffon to a conceited young man, "have I not the enjoyment of this day as fully as you? If I conform my actions, my appetites, my desires, to the strict impulses of wise nature, am I not as wise and happy as you are? And the view of the past, which causes so much regret to old fools, does it not afford me, on the contrary, the pleasures of memory, agreeable pictures of precious images, which are equal to your objects of pleasure? For these images are sweet; they are pure; they leave upon the mind only pleasing remembrances; the