A certain portion of external and internal variety, like change of air, keeps the animal functions in due activity, while it renders the mind supple and elastic, and more capable of accommodating itself with promptitude to those difficult and trying circumstances into which the vicissitudes of life may plunge it. I admire and respect solid learning; but even a superficial knowledge of a variety of subjects tends to excite that inexhaustible succession of thoughts which, at hand on every emergency, gives tone and vigour both to the head and heart, (not infrequently excluding more unwelcome visitors,) and is a decided and triumphant enemy to hanging, drowning, shooting, cutting of throats, and every other species of suicide except that which so frequently originates from being too rich—a misfortune which seldom falls to the lot of persons who follow the system I have recommended. I do really think, that if a very rich man, who meditated suicide, would for one moment reflect what sincere pleasure his heirs, executors, administrators, and personal representatives (probably his wife and children) would derive from his dangling from the ceiling, he would lock up his rope and become vastly more hospitable.
All my life I perceived the advantage of breeding ideas: the brain can never be too populous, so long as you keep its inhabitants in that wholesome state of discipline, that they are under your command, not you under theirs; and, above all things, never suffer a mob of them to come jostling each other in your head at the same time: keep them as distinct as possible, or it is a hundred to one they will make a blockhead of you at last.
From this habit it has ensued that the longest day is always too short for me. If in tranquil mood, I find my ideas as playful as kittens; if chagrined, consolatory fancies are never wanting. When a man can send the five orders of architecture to build castles in the firmament, of any shape, size or materials he may fancy, and furnish it accordingly, I think a permanent state of melancholy quite unnecessary. Should I grow weary of thoughts relating to the present, my memory carries me back fifty or sixty years with equal politeness and activity; and never ceases shifting time, place, and person, till it lights on some matter more agreeable.
I had naturally very feeble sight: at fifty years of age, to my extreme surprise, I found it had strengthened so much as to render the continued use of spectacles unnecessary; and now I can peruse the smallest print without any glass, and can write a hand so minute, that I know several elderly gentlemen of my own decimal who cannot conquer it even with their reading-glasses. For general use I remark, that I have found my sight more confused by poring for a given length of time over one book, than in double that time when shifting from one print to another, and changing the place I sat in, and of course the quality of light and reflection: to a neglect of such precautions I attribute many of the weak and near visions so common with book-worms.
But another quality of inestimable value which I did and still do possess, thank Heaven! in a degree which, at my time of life, if not supernatural, is not very far from it—is a memory of the most wide-ranging powers: its retrospect is astonishing to myself, and has wonderfully increased since my necessary application to a single science has been dispensed with. The recollection of one early incident of our lives never fails to introduce another; and the marked occurrences of my life from childhood to the wrong side of a grand climacteric are at this moment fresh in my memory, in all their natural tints, as at the instant of their occurrence.
Without awarding any extraordinary merit either to the brain, or to those human organs generally regarded as the seat of recollection, or rather retention of ideas, I think this fact may be accounted for in a much simpler way—more on philosophical than on organic principles. I do not insist on my theory being a true one; but as it is, like Touchstone’s forest-treasure, “my own,” I like it, and am content to hold by it “for better, for worse.”
The two qualities of the human mind with which we are most strongly endowed in childhood are those of fear and memory; both of which accompany us throughout all our worldly peregrinations—with this difference, that with age the one generally declines, while the other increases.
The mind has a tablet whereon Memory begins to engrave occurrences even in our earliest days, and which in old age is full of her handy-work, so that there is no room for any more inscriptions. Hence old people recollect occurrences long past better than those of more recent date; and though an old person can faithfully recount the exploits of his schoolfellows, he will scarcely recollect what he himself was doing the day before yesterday.
It is also observable that the recollection, at an advanced period, of the incidents of childhood, does not require that extent of memory which at first sight may appear essential; neither is it necessary to bound at once over the wide gulf of life between sixty years and three.
Memory results from a connected sequence of thought and observation: so that intervening occurrences draw up the recollection as it were to preceding ones, and thus each fresh-excited act of remembrance in fact operates as a new incident. When a person recollects well (as one is apt to do) a correction which he received in his childhood, or whilst a schoolboy, he probably owes his recollection not to the whipping, but to the name of the book which he was whipped for neglecting; and whenever the book is occasionally mentioned, the whipping is recalled, revived, and perpetuated in the memory.