The association of ideas between places and the persons seated in them, together with the divisions of a large space into small parcels, concur in the arrangement of guests at a table to furnish the greatest assistance to memory. But the plan of memory, attributed to Simonides, multiplied incumbrances, instead of assistance. It consisted in assuming a large, imaginary space, like a public building, or a market place; dividing it into imaginary compartments; placing on each of these compartments an image of some animal or other object emblematical of the subject, which you wish to remember. This unwieldy process of remembrance, first of imaginary places, then of imaginary animals, and then of the real object, to which you would refer, was applied even to single words; and we are seriously taught, that we may remember a conjunction copulative by thinking of Vulcan and his forge; or a conjunction disjunctive by recollecting the graces, as they stand back to

back.

A Mr. Grey has recently published in England a different system, under the title of Memoria Technica; the application of which he has confined to chronology, geography, and the ancient weights, measures, and coins. His plan consists

in taking the first part of certain well known names of men, places, or coins; and, instead of their terminating letters, substituting another termination of letters, representing certain numbers. Thus the union of the half-name with the numerical termination forms a barbarous word, by fixing which in the memory, we shall always retain not only the name, but any circumstance of numbers connected with it, which it may be material to possess. Thus instead of Alexander, Caesar, and Mahomet, we are to say Alexita, Caes, and Mahomoudd; the first letters being sufficient to remind us of the persons, and the closing letters intending to represent numbers, which mark the year before or after the christian era, when they died. A chronological succession of Roman emperors or English kings may be composed of such associated letters, and formed into six, eight, or ten lines; which, being once learnt by heart, may fix upon the memory in the compass of half an hour the whole history of a nation.

Mr. Grey's system, like the art of writing in shorthand, will be found useful to those, who will undergo the toil of making themselves masters of it. To those expedients a reflecting mind will always be able to add others of its own. The pow

er of association is susceptible of numberless modifications; and its effects upon the understanding are as great, as in the following lines of a living poet they are said to be upon the affections.

Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain,
Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain.
Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise!
Each stamps its image, as the other flies.
Each, as the varied avenues of sense

Delight or sorrow to the soul dispense,
Brightens or fades; yet all, with magic art,

Control the latent fibres of the heart.

PLEAS. MEM. 1. 170.

LECTURE XXXVI.

DELIVERY.

AT the introduction of the course of lectures, which I am now to conclude, in dividing the science of rhetoric into its principal constituent parts, according to the distribution of the great masters of antiquity, I informed those of you, who then heard me, that what we now include under the common term, delivery, as applied to public speaking, was by them called action or pronunciation. It consists of two things; the deportment of the body, and the utterance of the words. It was therefore denominated action in reference to the gestures; and pronunciation in regard to the voice.

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The modern usages of public oratory are so different from those of antiquity, and gesture bears so small a proportion of an oratorical performance, that we can scarcely conceive how it could have been of such importance, as to have engrossed the name; as if the whole delivery had consisted of action. But Demosthenes, according to the well known anecdote related of him, carried his ideas of it still further, and considered it as comprising the whole art of eloquence.

Cicero, in his dialogues de oratore, observes truly that in every thing, appertaining to the action of a discourse, there is a certain energy, derived from nature herself; and which has therefore a peculiar efficacy upon all mankind; which sways the illiterate, as well as the learned; the vulgar, as much as the wellbred; the savage, as much as the civilized. Words can effect only those, with whom the speaker is associated by the ties of a common language. Pointed sentences often skim over the minds of men of senses unrefined. But action is the very emotion of the soul, and moves all alike; for the affections are universally excited by the same gestures; and they are by every heart recognised in itself; and indicated to others by the same tokens.