Quickness of memory is that quality which is most easily developed, especially in young persons. It is also its most showy quality, and the temptation to give it an inordinate development is strong. The habit of getting things by rote, is easily acquired by practice. It is astonishing what masses of Scripture texts young children will get by heart, when under some special stimulus of reward or display. I have often refused to publish marvellous feats of this kind, not because I thought the accounts incredible, (unfortunately, they were too true,) but because I thought they were a species of mental excess, and they should no more be encouraged than bodily excesses. A little girl in my own Sunday-School once actually committed to memory the whole of the Westminster Assembly's Shorter Catechism in three days! Six months afterwards she hardly knew a word of it. It had been a regular mental debauch. A few more such atrocities would have made her an idiot. College records tell us of what are called "crammed men," that is, men who literally stuff themselves with knowledge in order to pass a particular examination, or to gain a particular honor, and who afterwards forget their knowledge, as fast as they have acquired it. There is a well authenticated instance of a student who actually learned the six books of Euclid by heart, though he could not tell the difference between an angle and a triangle. The memory of such men is quickened like that of the parrot. They learn purely by rote. Real mental attention, the true digester of knowledge, is never roused. The knowledge which they gorge, is never truly assimilated and made their own. A quality of memory vastly more important than quickness, is tenacity. To hold on to what we get, is the secret of mental, no less than of pecuniary accumulations. The mind, too, like other misers, clings most tenaciously to that which has cost it most labor. Come lightly, go lightly, the world over. Knowledge which comes into the mind without toil and effort, without protracted and laborious attention, is apt to go as easily as it came.