Other memories are unreceptive and unreliable. My own is such, and I am afraid after this confession you will be disposed to be sceptical as to what I propose to relate, and think all my stories yarns. But here comes in what I donot understand, though J have experienced it less blanks; and then something like lighthouses shine out along the coast of the dark and otherwise forgotten past. What specially soft and impressionable part of the brain was touched years ago, and that touch registered, ticketed, for future use, and what other parts were and why so, callous, and unreceptive. And one more curious phenomenon some, perhaps, know with me; a kind of cycle of remembrance. At intervals—generally pretty long ones—memory suddenly hears a voice, smells a scent, and a vision of bygone events is instantaneously awakened; the vision flashes by, and then after months or even year, the same call and savour and touch come again; again they are gone, and 81 the return depends apparently on the revelation of some precise part of the brain to catch that precise sound or sensation.
"Till all at once beyond the will, I hear a wizard music roll, And through a lattice in the soul Looks thy fair face, and makes it still."
But for other utter idleness I ought to hav memory, for in my early days we pursued much the method of China's old schools (I fear to their detriment, it is going out in the new schools)—the method of memorizing. I could repeat, and most school boys could do so then, the Georgics of Virgil or at least two by heart; and the Odes of Horace; and at least one or two Greek plays; and from Homer. It is all gone bat the strength of memory ought to have remained.
Wordsworth would have us think of our memory as in reality going beck very far indeed "Our birth is bat a sleep and " forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, ourlife's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, Bat trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy My first memory in these seventy years which I review was when I was fourteen months old. I was born on April 10, 1836. A day made yet more illustrious later by the abortive Chartist riots in London. I can just remember the swearing-in of special constables on that occasion. In Jane 1837 King William 1V died "leaving," as Morley says in his Life of Gladstone, 'a heavy legacy to his successor." That successor was the girl queen, our dearly loved and venerated Queen Victoria; so that if this memory of mine is accepted, you see I was alive and more or less alert all down the Queen's long reign of sixty-four years, and now through six years of King Edward's reign. Now this memory does not fade after seventy summers; it tells me that I was carried, and makes me feel being carried by my nurse to our vicarage garden gate, while the bells of the Churches in Fordington and Dorchester were tolling for the passing of the my memory describes this event, and who I ask can disprove it? And from my children's aod: grandchildren's iutelligence and quickness, I see no reason for doubting my ability, though not precocious yet also not an idiot, to notice and remember the event.
'A short time before my birth, my eldest brother, ten yeats my senior, witnessed the terrible outburst of the indignation of the farm labourers, manifesting itself in reckless wheat-rick burning as s protest against the introduction of machinery both in manufactures and agriculture, This, was preceded and accompanied by the introduction of railways. Gladstone's Act of 1830—stipalating that the State may interfere when necessary with the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.