Yet, as I write, let me call to mind, if but for a moment, the remembrance of those happy evenings, when we would meet to read Shakespeare or the Poets in each other’s rooms, and pleasant sympathies and pleasant differences of opinion freely discussed, called into genial life, friendships which we once hoped and believed would never have grown cold. Let the image of that bright social circle, picturesquely scattered in armchairs round the winter fire, rise up before my fancy once more, and let me recall what can never be again. Of the honoured and well-loved few who one night recorded their names and thoughts in one precious little book, two are dead though it is but five years back; C E B— is dead; and R H P— is dead; C E B— the chivalrous and gallant-hearted, the champion of the past, the “Tory whom Liberals loved;” and R H P—, the honest and noble, the eloquent speaker, and the brave actor, and the fearless thinker—he, too, is dead, nobly volunteering in works of danger and difficulty during the Indian Mutiny; but L—, and B—, and M—, and others are living yet, and to them I consecrate this page they will forgive the digression, and for their sakes I will venture to let it pass. We are scattered now, and our friendship is a silent one, but yet I know that to them, at least, changed or unchanged, my words will recall the fading memory of glorious days.
The conversation, (but do not suppose that I shall attempt, after what I have said, to reproduce it), happened to turn that evening on the phenomena of memory. It started thus:— They had been discussing some subject of the day, when Owen observed to Julian—
“Why, how grave you look, Julian.”
“Do I? I was thinking of something odd. While you were talking—without the faintest apparent reason that I can discover, (and I was trying to hit upon one when you spoke)—a fact started up in my mind, which had no connection whatever with the subject, and yet which forced itself quite strongly and obtrusively on my notice.”
“Just as one catches sight suddenly of some stray bit of seaweed floating in a great world of waters, which seems to have no business there,” said Kennedy.
“Yes. But there must have been some reason for my thinking of it just then.”
“The law of association, depend upon it,” said Owen, “even if the connecting links were so subtle and swiftly moved that you failed to detect their presence.”
“Are you of the Materialist school, Owen, about memory?” said Julian, “i e, do you go with Hobbes and Condillac, and make it a decaying sense or a transformed sensation?”
“Not a bit; I believe it to be a spiritual faculty, entirely independent of mere physical organisation.”
“Wo-ho!” said Kennedy; “the physiologists will join issue with you there. How for instance do you account for such stories as that of the groom, who, getting a kick on a particular part of the head from a vicious horse, suffered no harm except in forgetting everything which had happened up to that time?”