Dr Thomas Fuller, the worthy historian and divine, was said to have been able to repeat five hundred and nine strange names correctly after having twice heard them; and he was known to make use of a sermon verbatim if he once heard it. He once undertook to name exactly backwards and forwards every shop-sign from Temple Bar to the extremity of Cheapside, on both sides of the way—a feat of no ordinary magnitude, when we consider that in his day every house had its sign.
'Memory' Thompson boasted he could remember every shop from Ludgate Hill to the end of Piccadilly; and another person who had earned for himself the prefix of 'Memory' was William Woodfall, the printer of the famous Letters of Junius, who used to relate how he could put a speech away upon a shelf in his mind for future reference; and he was known to be able to remember a debate for a fortnight, after many nights' speaking upon other matters.
Dr Johnson was in the habit of writing abridged reports of debates for the Gentleman's Magazine from memory.
Two noted frequenters of the Chapter Coffee-House in Paternoster Row, in the last century, were Murray and Hammond. Murray had read through every morning and evening paper published in London for thirty years, and his memory was such that he was always applied to for dates and facts by literary men and others.
Jedediah Buxton, who resided for some weeks at St John's Gate Clerkenwell, in 1754, had such a memory that 'he could conduct the most intricate calculations by his memory alone, and such was his power of abstraction that no noise could disturb him.' Singular to relate, he never learned to read or write, though he was the son of a schoolmaster.
Eugenia Jullian, a precocious child, well known to the writer of this, at the age of five years had a book given her to read; and looking through it, she at length read a poem of several hundred lines (it must be mentioned she knew her alphabet at eleven months old, and could read at three years of age) once through; and being asked what she had read, she handed her mother the book, and repeated the whole without a mistake. Unfortunately, like most precocious children, her mind proved too powerful for a delicate constitution, and she died at an early age.
Among other possessors of very retentive memories may be mentioned the learned Pope Clement VI.; Dr Monsey, who died at Chelsea at the age of ninety-five; and Mozart, who almost in every case composed his pieces before he committed them to paper.
At the present time, Elihu Burritt possesses a remarkable memory. Born in America in 1811, he had, at the age of twenty-seven, and while working at his trade, learned fifty languages. In 1846 he came to England, and was for some time United States consul at Birmingham. Gustave Doré is the owner of a good memory; and we have it from a reliable authority, that Thomas Carlyle, 'the philosopher of Chelsea,' lays a book aside when he has read it, it being of no more use to him, having abstracted and stored up in his mind all the contents which he deems worthy of retention.
Every one has a memory, but every one has not the same natural affinities, and therefore every one does not retain with equal facility the same sort of thing. One man, from taking a glance at an object, will sketch it correctly; another could not give a correct representation were he to labour for a month. The mind of another is more for living objects, and like Cuvier or Knox, he carries in his memory the names and forms of hundreds of plants and animals. A third has a propensity for the faces of his fellow-creatures, and like Themistocles, he can name each of the twenty thousand of his fellow-citizens; or like Cyrus, he could remember the name of every soldier in his army; the like being related of L. Scipio and the Romans. The day following the arrival of Cinaes, ambassador of King Pyrrhus, in Rome, he saluted by name all the senate and the gentlemen of the city. Our own George III. had an extraordinary power of recollecting faces. The taste of a fourth is for languages, and like Mezzofanti or Alexander Murray, every word he hears or reads in a foreign tongue becomes a lifelong heritage. Another retains mathematics, the symbols of which require a peculiar cast of memory. Such a mind is generally destitute of love of colour, music, &c.; it wrestles with the artificial symbols that express the most extensively important truths of the world. The natural history memory has to do with artificial symbols, but with these it mixes the consideration of actual appearances to the senses. The taste of another is for choice, emphatic, and sublime diction; like Wakefield, he can repeat the whole of Virgil and Horace, Homer and Pindar.
The faculty of recollecting places is very large in some of the inferior animals; pigeons and some sorts of dogs have it very prominently. The falcon of Iceland returns to its native spot from a distance of several thousands of miles. And it seems likely that this has at least something to do with reference to those birds which migrate from one country to another. It seems indispensable to a successful traveller. Columbus, Cook, Park, and Livingstone must have been largely endowed with this faculty. These diversities have not been sufficiently kept in view in the important business of education, and the principle of cramming the same things into every sort of memory still too extensively prevails.