Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/389

Rh mediately his energy was roused. A letter on the subject written by him to Petrarch's son-in-law is full of the fire and energy of his early style. He entreats Franceschino to publish at once an authentic copy of the work. He deplores the carelessness of Petrarch's executors in not appointing a competent person as editor of his literary remains. He even seems to give credence to wild rumours of one or more of Petrarch's "Trionfi" having been destroyed by envious persons, and points out the grave responsibility attaching to the possession of such invaluable treasures. In compliance with his wish Franceschino ordered an exact copy of the work to be made expressly for Boccaccio, who unfortunately died before it was finished. There is, however, little doubt that to his energetic interference the preservation of "Africa" is mainly due; and however, much we may differ from contemporary criticism as to the value of that work, we cannot refuse our admiration to a friendship outlasting death itself.

Boccaccio survived his friend one year and five months, dying in December 1375. Shortly before his end he wrote a sonnet, in which the two great affections of his life—for Petrarch and Fiammetta—find pathetic utterance. I have attempted a literal translation, which may fitly close this article:—

1em

1em

, rather than Rogers, ought to have written "The Pleasures of Memory," if those pleasures were to have been so illustrated that the rest of the world could understand what under the most favourable circumstances they really might be. For probably no man who ever lived got such a lasting and inexhaustible fund of delight out of his memory as Lord Macaulay. He began early, and the delight it gave him hardly died before him. Mr. Trevelyan records, in the "Life and Letters" which we elsewhere review, that at eight years of age he got hold of Scott's "Lay" during a call somewhere with his father, and that from that one reading, he was familiar enough with it to repeat canto after canto to his mother when he returned home. And perhaps such feats of memory as the following are even more remarkable, though we will not say that the last of them belongs to the class which, taken individually, produces very exquisite pleasure:—

At one period of his life he was known to say that, if by some miracle of vandalism all copies of "Paradise Lost" and the "Pilgrim's Progress" were destroyed off the face of the earth, he would undertake to reproduce them both from recollection whenever a revival of learning came. In 1813, while waiting in a Cambridge coffee-room for a post-chaise which was to take him to his school, he picked up a county newspaper containing two such specimens of provincial poetical talent as in those days might be read in the corner of any weekly journal. One piece was headed "Reflections of an Exile," while the other was a trumpery parody on the Welsh ballad "Ar hyd y nos," referring to some local anecdote of an ostler whose nose had been bitten off by a filly. He looked them once through, and never gave them a thought for forty years, at the end of which time he repeated them both without missing, or, as far as he knew, changing a single word.

But though such instances of retentiveness as this last cannot in themselves have been the cause of any great individual satisfaction to Lord Macaulay, it seems likely enough that it was the strange power to which this feat of memory points, of remembering the physical collections of words, without any special interest in their meaning,—of remembering them, that is, in great measure from their look, as well as from their sound or sense,—that some of his most pleasurable intellectual efforts proceeded. For instance, this power probably made all the difference to the strain on his memory. If you can remember the words of anything as a picture—just as you remember the pictures on the walls—you have not got to translate, as it were, from one medium (printed words) into another (spoken words) before either catching their drift or, of course, retaining it. Probably this was one of the chief reasons why Lord Macaulay was so rapid as well as 