The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1877-09-15
THE PACIFIC
Gommert1alA0bertiser
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER Is.
Macaulay as a Reader.

To read without remembering is of slight utility
To remember without judgment is little, if any
better. 1 have read of individuals but slightly re-
moved from idiocy, who could repeat a sermon, or g
poem from having heard it only once. In MacaulaJ
the grasp of memory was wonderful, and few If any,
better knew how to utilize his multifarious reading
"The child is the father of the man." "Fron
the time that he was three years old he read inces-
sanity, for the most part lying on the rug before the
fire, with his book on the ground, and a piece Of
bread and butter in his hand, and he was very fond
of repeating what he had been reading in language
far above his years. His memory retained without
effort the phraseology of the book. which he had
last been engaged on, and he talked, as the maid
said. with 60 printed words.'' In his eighth year his
mother writes, "My dear Tom continues to show
marks of uncommon genius. He gets on wonderfully
in all branches of his education, and the extent OF
his reading, and of the knowledge he has derived
from it are truly astonishing in a boy not yet eight
wears old. He is at the same time as playful as a
kitten"
HE read widely, increasingly, more than rapidly.
The secret of his immense requirements lay in two
invaluable gifts of nature; an unerring memory,
and the capacity of taking in at a glance the con-
tents of a printed page. During the first part of
his life ne remembered whatever caught his fancy,
without the process of consciously getting it by
heart. As a child, during an afternoon call made
with his father, he found on a table the clay of
the Last Minstrel which he had never before met
with. He kept himself quiet with his prose while
the elders were talking, and on his return home sat
down on his mothers bed, and repeated to her as
many cantos as she had the patience or the strength
to listen to. At one period of his life he was known
to say that, if by some miracle of vandalism all
| copies of Paradise Lost and "The Pilgrims
Progress were destroyed from the face of the earth,
he would undertake to reproduce them both from
recollection.
"Whena about thirteen years of age, while waiting
for a post chaise, he picked up a county newspaper
containing two such specimens Of provincial poeti-
cal talent as in those days might be read in the cor
ner of any weekly journal. One piece was headed
{" Reflections of an Exile,' while the other was a
trampers parody on the Welsh ballad, "As hyde
nos,' referring to some local anecdote of a hostler
whose nose had been bitten off by a FLY. He looked
them once through, and never gave them a thought
for forty years. at the end of which time he repeated
them both without missing, or, as far as he knew,
changing a single word.''
"H read books faster than other people skinned
them, and SKINNED them as fast as any one else
could turn the leaves. And this speed was not OBJ
tanned at the expense of accuracy for he looked
upon Interpretations as a species of minor sacrilege.''
Of his voyage to India in 1884 he writes, SEX
cept at meals I hardly exchange a word with any
human being. l never was left for so long O time so
completely to my own resources; and 1 am glad to
say that 1 found them quite sufficient to keep me
cheerful and employed. During the whole voyage
read with keen and increasing enjoyment. I de-
YOUR Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and
English; folios. quartos. octavos. duodecimos."
And again he writes, "My power of finding
amusements without companions was pretty well
tried on my voyage. 1 read insatiably; the Had
and Odyssey, Virgil, Horace, Cesar's Common
taries, Bacon, De Augmentis, Dante, Petrarch,
Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbons Rome, Mills
India, all the seventy volumes of Voltaire, Sis
mondi's History of France, and the seven thick
fOlios of the Geographic Britannica"
Later he writes, 81 have just finished a second
reading of Sophocles. / am now deep in Plato, and
intend to go right through all his works. His
genius is above praise. 1 have nearly finished Livy.
admire him greatly, and would give a quarters
salary to recover the lost Decades. While reading
the earlier books I went again through Neibuhr;
and l am sorry to say that, having always been q
little ~skeptical about his merits, 1 am now a con-
unbeliever.'
Again he writes, while engaged in preparing q
criminal code for India, "I am deep in
Examination of the political theories of the old phi
1 have read Plato's Republic, and his
Laws; and 1 am now reading Aristotle's Politics;
after which 1 shall go through Plato's two treatises
again. L every now and then read one of Plutarcb,s
Lives on an idle afternoon; and in this way have
got through a dozen of them. I like him prodipi-
He is inaccurate, to be sure, and a roman
but he tells a story delightfully."-, and his illus
rations and sketches of character are as good no
nything in ancient eloquence.
"As to Latin, I am finishing Lucan; and I am
usly engaged with Cicero, whose character. moral
nd intellectual, interests me prodigiously. 1 think
hat l see the whole man through and through.
ave gone through all Ovid's poems, I admire him.
ut l was tired to death before l got to the end ,,
Here are his reading accounts for thirteen months
} the end of 1886. During these thirteen months
have read Aeschylus twice; Sophocles twice: Euri-
ides once; Pindar twice; Callimachus; Apollon-
Is Rhodius; Quintus Curtius; Theocritus twice:
Thucidides; almost all Xenopbon's
orks; almost all Plato; Aristotle's Politics, and a
pod deal of his Organon, dipping elsewhere into
i'm; the whole of Plutarch's Lives; about half of
ucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; PIautus
vice; Terence twice; Lucretius twice; Catullus:
lbullus; Propertius; Lucan; Status; Silius Itali-
Llvy; Obeneius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar;
Id lastly Cicero"
~ iOut yearS VI lie sOJourn IN 1nula must have
zen crowded with labor. He was president of the
oard of Education, the duties of which Office must
we occupied much of his time. Then the Penal
for India was, very largely, his work. He says A
it, 1t has cost me very intense labor; and what
er its faults may be, it is certainly not O slovenly
and while he was devouring Greek
I'd Latin works with such astonishing rapidity, he 4
no means neglected books in the modern langua-
8. And besides all this, he wrote articles for the
iinburgh Review, one of them occupying over a
inbred pages of that work. AL1oU1s.