of his own brain, and learns everything before him in galloping from the Hellespont to Alexandria, Jupiter Hammon, and the Ganges. He is soon everywhere at home, and everywhere successful, and still has time enough to be every day drunk, and to die at thirty-two. He could not have gone on at such a rate, without possessing some extraordinary memory. Some may believe that he was owing this memory to nature, which vouchsafed to make of him expressly a genius, a monster, perhaps a god: we say, most simply, he had his dear teacher's mnemonicon under his helm. We believe that it is to this science that Alexander alludes in his letter to Aristotle, written amidst his triumphs in Asia, when he heard that his instructer was to publish that part of knowledge which he did not communicate to the common scholar: here is the letter.
"Alexander to Aristotle, prosperity.
"You did wrong in publishing the acroamatic parts of science. In what shall we differ from others, if the sublimer knowledge which we gained from you be made common to all the world? For my part, I had rather excel the bulk of mankind in superior parts of learning, than in the extent of power and dominion. Farewell!"
This gentle hint of the "little jealous student," explains sufficiently for the loss of the mnemonicon.
Another man, contemporary with the since-lost mnemonicon, and a fellow-student under Plato, with Aristotle, is Demosthenes; and no man can hitherto match him in his all-embracing eloquence. Every commis-voyageur, and every Billingsgate woman, are Demostheneses in their respective spheres, with the raw materials of which they are perfectly familiar; but to be eloquent in the station of a Demosthenes, amidst an Athenian republic corrupt by the gold of a neighbouring Philip of
