It is, however, the association by distant resemblances in objects, by analogies in effects and in emotions which furnishes the mind with perhaps the most interesting materials for social converse. Such a mind is what the world calls _brilliant_. We soon tire of it, however, if it does not occasionally relax, and give us a few of those details and minutiæ, which belong to the mind of the first order in our division. As was said of the poetry of Thomas Moore, we do not like always to feed upon the _whip syllabubs_ we soon become hungry for _bread and meat_. Such a mind as the one I have just been describing, has rarely a very accurate or exact memory. The imagination is too active for the fidelity of the memory. Pope has well asserted, that "Where beams of warm imagination play, The memory's soft figures melt away." Men possessing such minds as these rarely make good historians or profound philosophers. They neither narrate with fidelity, nor can they philosophize with ability. Their imagination gilds and varnishes the knowledge they have accumulated. Events, as Boswell expresses it, _grow mellow_ in their memories.[11] But for this very reason do they become exceedingly brilliant in conversation, when they have the power of communicating their ideas well. Mr. Stewart tells as that Boswell himself was a striking exemplification of his own remark, "for his stories," says Mr. S. "which I have often listened to with delight, seldom failed to _improve_ wonderfully in such a keeping as _his_ memory afforded. They were much more amusing than even his printed anecdotes; the latter were deprived of every chance of this sort of _improvement_, by the scrupulous fidelity with which (probably from a secret distrust of the accuracy of his recollection) he was accustomed to record every conversation which he thought interesting, a few hours after it took place." [Footnote 11: "I have often experienced," says Boswell in his tour through the Hebrides with Dr. Johnson, "that scenes through which a man has past _improves by lying in the memory: they grow mellow_."]