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required from any part of the Bible--even the obscurest and most
unimportant enumeration of mere proper names not excepted. We do not
mention these facts as touching the more difficult part of the
question before us, but facts they are; and if we find so much
difficulty in calculating the extent to which the mere memory may be
cultivated, are we, in these days of multifarious reading, and of
countless distracting affairs, fair judges of the perfection to
which the invention and the memory combined may attain in a simpler
age, and among a more single minded people?--Quarterly Review, l.
c., p. 143, sqq.
Heeren steers between the two opinions, observing that, "The
Dschungariade of the Calmucks is said to surpass the poems of Homer
in length, as much as it stands beneath them in merit, and yet it
exists only in the memory of a people which is not unacquainted with
writing. But the songs of a nation are probably the last things
which are committed to writing, for the very reason that they are
remembered."-- Ancient Greece. p. 100.
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6 Vol. II p. 198, sqq.
7 Quarterly Review, l. c., p. 131 sq.
8 Betrachtungen uber die Ilias. Berol. 1841. See Grote, p. 204. Notes
and Queries, vol. v. p. 221.
897
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