ON THE ABEYANCE OF MEMORY. 161 



"sported," our tendency will be to revert to this 

 particular dinner either next day, or as soon as 

 circumstances will allow, but it is possible that several 

 hundred dinners may elapse before we can do so 

 successfully, or before our memory reverts to this 

 particular dinner. 



4. As regards our habitual actions, however un- 

 consciously we remember them, we, nevertheless, 

 remember them with far greater intensity than many 

 individual impressions or actions, it may be of much 

 greater moment, that have happened to us more 

 recently. Thus, many a man who has familiarised 

 himself, for example, with the odes of Horace, so as 

 to have had them at his fingers' ends as the result of 

 many repetitions, will be able years hence to repeat 

 a given ode, though unable to remember any circum- 

 stance in connection with his having learnt it, and no 

 less unable to remember when he repeated it last. A 

 host of individual circumstances, many of them not 

 unimportant, will have dropped out of his mind, along 

 with a mass of literature read but once or twice, and 

 not impressed upon the memory by several repetitions ; 

 but he returns to the well-known ode with so little 

 effort, that he would not know that he was remember- 

 ing unless his reason told him so. The ode seems 

 more like something born with him. 



We observe, also, that people who have become 

 imbecile, or whose memory is much impaired, yet 

 frequently retain their power of recalling impressions 

 which have been long ago repeatedly made upon 

 them. 



