or three months together.  Malebranche, Hobbes, Corneille, and others, darkened their apartment when they wrote, to concentrate their thoughts, as Milton says of the mind, “in the spacious circuits of her musing.”  It is in proportion as we can suspend the exercise of all our other senses that the liveliness of our conception increases—­this is the observation of the most elegant metaphysician of our times; and when Lord Chesterfield advised that his pupil—­whose attention wandered on every passing object, which unfitted him for study —­should be instructed in a darkened apartment, he was aware of this principle; the boy would learn, and retain what he learned, ten times as well.  We close our eyes whenever we would collect our mind together, or trace more distinctly an object which seems to have faded away in our recollection.  The study of an author or an artist would be ill placed in the midst of a beautiful landscape; the “Penseroso” of Milton, “hid from day’s garish eye,” is the man of genius.  A secluded and naked apartment, with nothing but a desk, a chair, and a single sheet of paper, was for fifty years the study of BUFFON; the single ornament was a print of Newton placed before his eyes—­nothing broke into the unity of his reveries.  Cumberland’s liveliest comedy, The West Indian, was written in an unfurnished apartment, close in front of an Irish turf-stack; and our comic writer was fully aware of the advantages of the situation.  “In all my hours of study,” says that elegant writer, “it has been through life my object so to locate myself as to have little or nothing to distract my attention, and therefore brilliant rooms or pleasant prospects I have ever avoided.  A dead wall, or, as in the present case, an Irish turf-stack, are not attractions that can call off the fancy from its pursuits; and whilst in these pursuits it can find interest and occupation, it wants no outward aid to cheer it.  My father, I believe, rather wondered at my choice.”  The principle ascertained, the consequences are obvious.

The arts of memory have at all times excited the attention of the studious; they open a world of undivulged mysteries, where every one seems to form some discovery of his own, rather exciting his astonishment than enlarging his comprehension.  LE SAGE, a modern philosopher, had a memory singularly defective.  Incapable of acquiring languages, and deficient in all those studies which depend on the exercise of the memory, it became the object of his subsequent exertions to supply this deficiency by the order and method he observed in arranging every new fact or idea he obtained; so that in reality with a very bad memory, it appears that he was still enabled to recall at will any idea or any knowledge which he had stored up.  JOHN HUNTER happily illustrated the advantages which every one derives from putting his thoughts in writing, “it resembles a tradesman taking stock; without which he never knows either what he possesses, or in