though overcharged, may be in the main true; a ready memory is not always retentive; and the system pursued in the education of schools has of necessity a greater tendency to sharpen the faculty of seizing and collecting facts, than to bestow that generalizing and philosophical power by which they are arranged and preserved. The verses which he learned with so much facility were probably as quickly forgotten. The almost instantaneous rapidity with which some actors on the stage have been known to remember and repeat passages of great length,[1] is hardly more astonishing, than the shortness of the time during which the fleeting impressions remained upon their mind.
Goldsmith says, that his admission at the age of thirteen into the college at Dublin is a proof of the early maturity of his understanding. His compositions shew the extent and solidity of his classical knowledge. He took the degree of Master of Arts on the 9th July, 1700, in the same year he was ordained a deacon by William, Bishop of Deny, having a dispensation, by reason of his being under the canonical age. About three years after he was ordained priest, and in
- ↑ See a remarkable instance of this power of rapidly seizing long passages, in the anecdotes of La Mothe's life. Voltaire was reading a tragedy to him,—La Mothe accused him of plagiarism, and instantly repeated the whole of the second scene of the fourth act, which he had just heard, to confirm the accusation. See Galerie de l'ancienne Cour, &c. vol. ii. p. 223.
