Thomas County cat. [volume] (Colby, Kan.) 1885-1891, 1886-08-05

all, of course, had rare memories. hut
the palm must be given to Person,
of whom endless stories are told. Be-
fore he went to Eton, he was able 10
repeat almost the whole of Horace,
Virgil, Homer, Cicero and Livy. When,
as practical joke. a school-fellow
slipped the wrong book into Persons
hand. just as he was about to read and
translate, the boy was not discon-
certed, but went on to read from his
memory, as if nothing had occurred.
In later life, his performances ap-
preached the miraculous 1t would re-
quire all our space to give any fair idea
Of them; for he not only knew all the
great Greek poets and prose writer's
pretty well by heart, but could recite
whole plays of Shakespeare, or COM
plete books from Paradise Lost, Pope's
Rape of the Lock, Barrow's sermons,
scenes from Foote, Edgeworth' s Essay
on Irish Bulls, scores of pages from
Gibbon or Rapin. He is also said to
have been able to repeat the whole of
the Moral Tale of the Dean of Badaioz,
and Smollett's Roderick Random from
the first page to the last
Gilbert Wakefeld's memory was
also of the gigantic order, but it will
not bear comparison with Persons.
There were few passages in Homer or
Pindar which he could not recite at a
moments notice; Virgil and Horace he
knew perfectly; and he could recite en-
tire books from the Old and New
Testaments without halting or failing
in a single verse. There was also
John Wyldbam Bruce, whose leisure
time was devoted to classical studies.
His chief favorite was Eschylus. the
whole of whose plays he had learnt by
heart, including the twelve hundred
lines of the Agamcnano,a collated by
Robertellus. He knew his Horace in
the same way, and was quite content,
until one day he met with an old fell
low-student at Bonn, who, when he
made a quotation, would mention
book. ode and verse, remarking that
he did not regard any one as knowing
Horace properly unless he could do
that. Mr.. Bruce accordingly set to
work at Horace again, and it was not
long before he could name the exact
place occupied by line in any of the
famous odes. 1t would be hard to be-
lieve that Athenian lads could beat the
English lads of fourteen years and UNI
der, of whom Archdeacon Fearon tells
us in the pamphlet referred to above.
1t was the custom in the school to
which he went for the boys to repeat at
the end of one of the terms all the
Latin and Greek poetry they had learnt
during the year. The usual quantity
for boy to go in with was from eight
to ten thousand lines, and it took about
a week to hear them. ''One boy in my
year," he says, repeated the enormous
quantity of fourteen thousand lines of
Homer, Horace and Virgil. heard
him say it,
Ease in learning foreign languages
is sometimes regarded as mere mat
ter of memory; while, however. this is
not exactly true, it must be allowed, of
course, that skilled linguists are en-
dowed with powers of memory beyond
the average. Here also we find that
there are no examples in ancient times
that will stand comparison with
our great modern linguists. Our
modern facilities for travel and study
place us at an immense advantage.
Crassus, when prator in Asia, was so
familiar with the dialects of Greek,
that he was able to try cases and pro-
nounce judgment in any dialect that
might chance to be spoken in his pres
ence. ''Mithridates, king of twenty
two nations, administered their laws
in as many languages" and could
harangue each division of his motley
array of soldiers in its own language
or dialect.
But what are such linguists as these
by the side Of the best examples of re-
cent times? Keeping within the limits
of the last hundred years, we have ex-
amples that have never been surpassed
or even approached in former times
Sir William Jones knew thirteen Ian
guages well, and could read with COM
parative ease in thirty others. John
Leyden, very inferior man to his
great contemporary, had good ac-
quaintance with fifteen of the leading
European and Asiatic languages.
Within the last few years we have lost
two men who could have Travelled from
VIC hiliS VIZ VI tuC
aims of Wales to the Ural mountains,
or from Lisbon or Algiers to lspahan or
Delhi. and hardly met with language
in which they could not converse or
write with ease. The reader will most
likely have anticipated the names of
two OF the most remarkable linguists
this country has produced-George
Borrow and Edward Henry Palmer.
When Borrow was at st. Petersburg,
he published little book called Tar
gum, in which he gave translations in
prose and poetry from thirty different
languages. Besides speaking the
native tongue OF every European nation,
Palmer was so perfect master of Ara
bic, Persian. Hindustani, Turkish and
the language of the gypsies, that even
natives were sometimes deceived as to |
his nationality. Mr.. Leland says that
one day in Paris Palmer ''entcred into
conversation with Zouave or Turco,
a native Arab. After while the man
said: why do you wear these clothes?'
Why, how should dress?' exclaimed |
Palmer. Dress like what you are!'
10