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More "Retentive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of riches; for he was naturally inquisitive, and desirous of the conversation of those from whom any information was to be obtained, but by no means solicitous to improve those opportunities that were sometimes offered of raising his fortune; and he was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which, when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook him; a quality which could never be communicated ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... third dervish came to his turn to speak, he said: 'My tale is but short, although story-telling is my profession. I am the son of a schoolmaster, who, perceiving that I was endowed with a very retentive memory, made me read and repeat to him most of the histories with which our language abounds; and when he found that he had furnished my mind with a sufficient assortment, he turned me out into the world under the garb of dervish, to relate them ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... any credulous foole that will weare it. You shall never observe him make any reply in places of publike concourse; hee ingenuously acknowledges himselfe to bee more bounden to the happinesse of a retentive memory, than eyther ability of tongue, or pregnancy of conceite. He carryes his table-booke still about with him, but dares not pull it out publikely. Yet no sooner is the table drawne, than he turnes notarie; by which meanes hee recovers the charge of his ordinarie. ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... far as I could judge, had been acquired through the theatre. The unacted plays were not familiar to him. Few people realize what a person of alert intelligence and retentive memory can learn of the best English literature through the theatre-going habit. Measuring Field's opportunity by my own, during the decade from 1873 to 1883, here is a list of Shakespearian plays he could have taken in ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... far easier thing to get into a house in Ireland than to get out of it again; for there is an attractive and retentive witchery about the hospitality of the natives of that country, which has no match, as far as I have seen, in the wide world. In other places the people are hospitable or kind to a stranger; but in Ireland the affair is reduced to ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... they obscured whole mines of truth and virtue. Having conceived a vague idea of his theme, he wrote hurriedly upon it. He was impelled by his previous notions and the excitement of the hour. He had a very retentive memory, but it was no aid to correct reasoning. When he saw one evil of the Fathers, a mistake of the church, or a defect in her doctrine, he generalized it until he believed error to be the rule instead of the exception. It has been said that, toward the close ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... amount of information they displayed concerning women, what retentive memories they had, and how very familiar they were with the subject of woman, her ways, and her sex nature. Their mental horizon was bounded on the north by the affairs of the ranch, on the east by the boss and his domestic concerns, on the south by woman as manifested by the various phases ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... she had small choice. She had looked into almost every device for increasing the sum of human knowledge and hastening the millennium, and she thought them all more or less valuable. Her memory, mercifully, was not a retentive one, therefore she remembered little of the beliefs she had outgrown; they never left even a deposit in the stretch of wet sand in which ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... have been born with the material for self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but his views are ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... certainty and little loss of time. The best readers of serious matter have a similar eagerness to discover what the author has to say; they get the author's question, and press on to find his answer. Such readers are both quick and retentive. The dawdling reader, who simply spends so much time and covers so many pages, in the vague hope that something will stick, does not remember the point because he never got the point, and never got it because ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... unfashionably retentive memory bring me so much of sweetness, then am I happy in your being unfashionable." And as she fastened a few to her corsage, placing the remainder in a vase, she continued: "See, god-mother dear, my sweet tea-roses with their perfumed voice will ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... amen: I, Davy Dickey, of the County of ——, and State of Alabama, being of sound mind and retentive memory, but knowing the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death, do hereby make and ordain this—my last ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... was extraordinarily retentive, and he seemed, without conscious effort, to have stored in his mind almost every whimsical or ludicrous narrative which he had read or heard. "On several occasions," says Mr. Brooks, "I have held in my hand a printed slip while he was repeating its contents to ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... a librarian ought to be,—the organizing head, the vigilant guardian, the seeker's index, the scholar's counsellor? His work is not merely that of administration, manifold and laborious as its duties are. He must have a quick intelligence and a retentive memory. He is a public carrier of knowledge in its germs. His office is like that which naturalists attribute to the bumble-bee,—he lays up little honey for himself, but he conveys the fertilizing pollen from flower ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his children under his own eye, till they could discern between good and evil; so, with the assistance of his generous master, my father ventured on a small farm on his estate. At those years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... something of the world, its sights and festivities, on his own account. True, also, that he tumbled into the river, and nearly ended his career at a very early age. Still he survived his river catastrophe; and, though he gained little book learning, possessed such a good and retentive memory, and was so observant, that his mind became stored with vivid impressions of the scenes and surroundings of his youth, which he related with great ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... Madge, with a retentive memory of the way Miss "Barbarous" had greeted her back in the mountains, stepped toward that much-astonished maiden, opened her red parasol straight in her face, and ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... reading and writing. Next follows arithmetic, with perhaps some rudiments of algebra and geometry. Afterward comes in due order the acquisition of languages, particularly the dead languages; a most fortunate occupation for those years of man, in which the memory is most retentive, and the reasoning powers have yet acquired neither solidity nor enlargement. Such are the occupations of the schoolboy in his ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... is small, shall be stored in tanks until a large volume has accumulated, and that it then be rapidly discharged over the soil. There is no objection to an actual saturation of the ground, provided the soil is not of such a retentive character as to be liable to become puddled, and so made impervious. The tanks being emptied, the flow ceases until they are again filled. During the interval, the liquid settles away in the soil, by which its impurities are removed. ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... professor of Greek. As professor of the mellifluous and most plastic of all the ancient tongues, he would undoubtedly have been proficient, as his college classics still remain fresh in his warm and retentive memory, and his literary taste is so severe and chaste as to make some of his scientific papers read like a psalm. But nature designed him for another, and some think a better, field, and endowed him with powers as a naturalist ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... place for the most part in large underground tanks excavated in the retentive clay. These remarkable tanks are often as much as 30 ft. in diameter by 60 ft. in depth, and hold from 5,000 to 8,000 barrels. In the construction of the tanks the alluvial soil, of which there is about 18 ft. or 20 ft. above the clay, is curbed with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... happy constitution and genial humors carried him abroad into sunshine and enjoyment, Johnson's physical infirmities and mental gloom drove him upon himself; to the resources of reading and meditation; threw a deeper though darker enthusiasm into his mind, and stored a retentive memory ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... first pointed out that a certain amount of movement between the ends of a fractured bone favours their union by promoting the formation of callus, and advocated the treatment of fractures by massage and movement, discarding almost entirely the use of splints and other retentive appliances. We were early convinced by the teaching of Lucas-Championniere, and have adopted his principles ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... of nervous matter is its retentive power. In other words, the modifications which accompany any experience, besides taking on the permanent character referred to above, pre-dispose the system to transmit impulses again through the same centres. Moreover, ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... clay is made lighter and more porous, and the lightest sand is readily made retentive of moisture and extremely productive, by plowing in different kinds of crops as green manure, such as cow peas, soy beans, the vetches, etc.; crimson clover, winter oats, rye, turnips, and numerous other crops may be sown ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... his musical and vocal lessons, Maltravers gently took the occasion to correct poor Alice's frequent offences against grammar and accent: and her memory was prodigiously quick and retentive. The very tones of her voice seemed altered in the ear of Maltravers; and, somehow or other, the time came when he was no longer sensible of the difference in ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "The retentive power of humus is but half as great as that of calcareous sand. We will add that the power or retaining heat is proportional to the density. It has also a relation to the magnitude of the particles. It is for this reason that ground covered ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... Koenigsgraaf days in consequence of the resolutions which she herself had made. Now, as he often told himself, they were as completely separated as though each had determined never again to communicate with the other. Months had gone by since a word had passed between them. He was a man, patient, retentive, and by nature capable of enduring such a trouble without loud complaint; but he did remember from day to day how near they were to each other, and he did not fail to remind himself that he could hardly expect to find constancy in ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... wide open. I could plainly see its terrible fangs and poison glands. Then, holding its head close up to his lips, he injected the dark saliva into its throat, and once more flung it to the ground. Up to this time he had used no violence—nothing that would have killed a creature so retentive of life as a snake; and I still expected to see the reptile make its escape. Not so, however. It made no effort to move from the spot, but lay stretched out in loose irregular folds, without any perceptible motion ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... towns competed for the honor, Dr. Payson was associated with Chancellor Kent of New York, and Governor John Cotton Smith of Connecticut, as a committee to decide upon the rival claims. He is described as possessing a sharp, vigorous intellect, a lively imagination, a very retentive memory, and was universally esteemed as an able and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... He has paid the penalty of his misdeeds, and I see nothing to be gained by perpetuating them in connection with his own proper name. In all other particulars the foregoing narrative is as true as a tolerably retentive memory has enabled ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... insatiable thirst for knowledge, all the advantages of the village school were given him. His progress here was phenomenal. His eagerness to know truth; his power of mind to perceive, comprehend and analyze; his retentive memory, soon gave him first place among his fellows in the school in the village. A few years passed; he in the meantime having prepared himself, the master-mantle of the village school falls upon him. His work here caused a widening ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... rather retentive memory, and considerable powers of imagination, I was able at times to bring almost all the things of importance which I had met with in my reading, before my mind, and compare them both with each other, and with all that was already in my memory. And whatever appeared to me most rational, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... exercises:—And this was the more remarkable, that having turned his thoughts towards the ministry, he carried on his theological studies at the same time, and made great improvements therein, for his memory was so retentive, that he scarcely forgot any thing had heard or read. It was easy and ordinary for him to inscribe any sermon, after he returned to his chamber, at such a length, that the intelligent and judicious reader, who had heard it preached, would not find ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... through space which has a temperature of 200 deg. below zero; but we live, as it were, in a conservatory, in the midst of perpetual winter. We are roofed over by the air that treasures the heat, floored under by strata both absorptive and retentive of heat, [Page 95] and between the earth and air violets grow and grains ripen. The sun has a strange chemical power. It kisses the cold earth, and it blushes with flowers and matures the fruit and grain. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... dreary rattling of the box in demonstration of its retentive capacities. The mere force of the show stopped him from retorting; but when, to excuse Master Gammon for his tardiness, she related that he also had a money-box, and was in search of it, the farmer threw up his head with the vigour of a young man, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... lightly of this multifarious knowledge, and nothing can be more probable, than that attainment of many languages, with any approach to their fluent use, is beyond the power of man. But his diligence was exemplary, his memory retentive, and his understanding accomplished by classical knowledge; with those qualities, much might be done in any pursuit; and though modern orientalists protest against the superficiality of his acquirements, their variety has been admitted, and still ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... extraordinary powers of understanding, which were much cultivated by study, and still more by meditation and reflection. His memory was remarkably retentive, his imagination uncommonly vigorous, and his judgement keen and penetrating. He had a strong sense of the importance of religion; his piety was sincere, and sometimes ardent; and his zeal for the interests of virtue was often manifested in his conversation and in his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... but the work did not suit his strenuous nature, and he returned home and soon afterward received an appointment in this detective service. Job was known in the force as quiet, self-contained, observant, patient, and was possessed of an extraordinarily retentive memory. Rarely was it necessary for him to ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor
... Fulton. I'm going along like an old man I used to know who used to start to tell a story about his grandfather. He had an awfully retentive memory, and he never finished the story, because he switched off into something else. He used to tell about how his grandfather one day went into a pasture, where there was a ram. The old man dropped a silver dime in the grass, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... names—geographical ones in particular—by the score, impressing them on stubborn memories through the aid of some easily-learnt rhyme, or comic association, that made even the dullest comprehension retentive ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... beautiful language in a badly-prepared lesson on Virgil, or expressing unreal indignation and unjustifiably exalted sentiments to evil doers, and one realizes his disadvantage against the quiet youngster whose retentive memory was storing up all these impressions for an ultimate judgment, and one understands, too, a certain relief that mingled with his undeniable emotion when at last the time came for young Benham, "the one living purpose" of his life, to be off to Minchinghampton ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... retentive mind had seized, long ago, on Rowlatt's recommendation at the Little Bear Inn, and he had developed, perhaps half consciously, a half sense of humour. A whole sense, however, is not congruous with the fervid beliefs and soaring ambitions ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... my friends from the superficial nature of my acquisitions, which being, in the mercantile phrase, got up for society, very often proved flimsy in the texture; and thus the gifts of an uncommonly {p.047} retentive memory and acute powers of perception were sometimes detrimental to their possessor by encouraging him to a ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... self-deceit, or the wish to deceive others; nervousness or fear, inducing reticence and concealment of faults, excess of modesty or the occasional tendency of persons of genius to underrate their own powers, inattention to studies, want of application, power to learn too easily, lack of retentive memory, exaggeration and boldness, bad temper, sullenness, disposition to quarrel, cowardice, cruelty, caprice as distinct from versatility, selfishness, greediness, laziness, and its various causes, and generally the germs of all faults and vicious propensities, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... Massachusetts, October 18th, 1829, and received his education at the public school. He was one of the brightest scholars in his class, learned easily, was fond of books, never wearied of study, and never forgot what he acquired. At the start he was blest with a most marvelous and retentive memory, and a keen sense of the practical side of life. "It was thus," as one of his friends has remarked, "that his school days were profitable to him to a degree not common, and it was thus that his rapidly-growing ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... societies having a definite membership, with initiatory rites and reciprocal duties. Each society had its peculiar songs; and there were officials chosen from among the members because of their good voices and retentive memories, to lead the singing and to transmit with accuracy the stories and songs of the society, which frequently preserved bits of tribal history. Fines were imposed upon any member who sang incorrectly, while ridicule always and everywhere followed ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... principle, time-serving and irreverent. The lawyers and other professional men were to be found, for the most part, in Paris and in the towns. They had their livelihood in the irregularities of society, and, as a class, were retentive of ancient custom and present social habits. Although by birth they belonged in the main to the third estate, they were in reality adjunct to the first, and consequently, being integral members of neither, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... native, was at length made intelligible to our Barwan guide, and he shaped his course accordingly. He took us through scrubs, having in the centre those holes where water usually lodges for some time after rain, where some substratum of clay happens to be retentive enough to impede the common absorption. But the water in these holes had been recently drunk, and the mud trampled into hard clay by the hoofs of cattle. Thus it is, that the aborigines first become sensible of the approach of the white man. These retired spots, where ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... be acquired between the ages of ten and eighteen—rules of grammar, strings of vocables, dates, names of towns, rivers, and mountains, mathematical formulas, etc. All depends here on the receptive and retentive powers of the mind. The memory has to be strengthened, without being overtaxed, till it acts almost mechanically. Learning by heart, I believe, cannot be too assiduously practised during the years spent ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... decomposers are thoroughly inoculated with microorganisms that can consume cellulose and lignin. Even though it looks like humus, it has not yet fully decomposed. It does have a water-retentive, granular structure that facilitates the presence of air and moisture throughout the mass creating perfect conditions for microbial digestion to ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... objection, that the Iliad and Odyssey are too long to have been preserved by memory, it may be met by a simple denial. It is a strange objection indeed, coming from a man of Wolf's retentive memory. I do not see how the acquisition of the two poems can be regarded as such a very arduous task; and if literature were as scanty now as in Greek antiquity, there are doubtless many scholars who would long since have had them at their tongues' end. Sir G. C. Lewis, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... Decomposing sandstone, and slate, known in Jamaica as rotten rock, mixed with vegetable mould, is one of the most favorable soils. The subsoil should be also carefully examined by a boring augur, for a stiff moist clay, or marly bottom retentive of moisture, is particularly injurious to the plant. A dark, rusty-colored sand, or a ferruginous marl on a substratum of limestone, kills the tree in a few years. In virgin lands, after the wood has been felled and cleared, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... has arrived, and the expansion given to the subject of the Day of Judgment. If we consider his language and manner, we remark the facility and copious flow of his poetic diction, but with a something that suggests the retentive mind of the student; his cumulation of old heroic phraseology not unlike the romantic poetry of Scott, joined occasionally with a departure from old poetic usage which seems like a slip on the part of an accomplished imitator.[134] Occasionally he has a Latin ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... useful, is pre-eminently so to the business man. It must be both retentive and quick. By proper training this faculty may be so cultivated that names, dates and events to a surprising number may be readily recalled. The ability to greet a customer by calling him by name is considered very valuable ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... of Montague, with Hurd, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, and the Rev. Mr. Arnold, as preceptor and sub-preceptor. During his education, common report spoke highly of the prince's quickness of apprehension, retentive memory, and general aptitude for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... integument of ragged cotton, or the long loose wool of a merino sheep yet unwoven into cloth. And as they forced their way through it—at times requiring strength to extricate them from its tough retentive hold—they could see the hideous forms of the huge spiders who had spun and woven these strangely patterned webs scuttling off, and from their dark retreats in the crevices of the trees looking defiant and angry at the intruders ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... sets of words. The first, which is related to the tain group (see below), has a key-syllable that means holding: tenant, tenement, tenure, tenet, tenor, tenable, tenacious, contents, contentment, lieutenant, maintenance, sustenance, countenance, appurtenance, detention, retentive, pertinacity, pertinent, continent, abstinence, continuous, retinue. The second has a key-syllable that means stretching: tend, tender, tendon, tendril, tendency, extend, subtend, distend, pretend, contend, attendant, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... I have a retentive memory. Of course I depend very largely upon it for all the small details that Roger has from time to time vouchsafed me in regard to his relations with Margarita, or I could not very well be writing these idle memories, but Roger was always a poor writer—that is to say, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... and plays full seven thousand pieces. In short, he plays every piece that he has ever heard. How almost godlike (it cannot be brought to human comparison) is this retentive, this perfect memory, as relating to all that is musical, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... of learning, we exchanged our notions with great delight. I perceived that I had, every day, more of his confidence, and always found new cause of admiration in the profundity of his mind. His comprehension is vast, his memory capacious and retentive, his discourse is methodical, and his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... comedy assumes naturally the form of the apophthegm—it is epigrammatic and compressed that it may be pungent and striking. Hence, no species of writing is more allied to or more likely to pass into household words, and to become proverbs among a people of quick retentive powers, such as the Greeks were, to whom we are perhaps indebted for this. I send you the extract from Alciatus; Emblemata, No. 162. Antverpiae, 18mo. 1584. ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... Euclid's Elements, both of which I found (to my almost equal wonder) he had managed to peruse: he was taking stock by the way, of the people, the products, and the country, with an eye unusually observant and a memory unusually retentive; and he was collecting for himself a body of magnanimous and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be the natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of the born American. To be pure-minded, to be patriotic, to get culture ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I was considered a very dull boy. My memory was not retentive, and I comprehended ideas and formulas expressed by others in a very imperfect manner. I needed a careful, judicious, and patient teacher, who understood the character of my mind, and who was able to come down to it with instruction in the simplest and clearest forms; thus helping me to ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... my violin and we played. Cecilia's musical memory is prodigious. Mine is also retentive and precise. But she had too much inventive genius for precision, unless the notes were before her, and sometimes I corrected her. Next, this delicious interlude over, I begged that the ladies would do me the honour to dine ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... and not too fast, leaning a little to talk with Miriam as he went. Their pace was regulated by her mother's, who advanced on the arm of Gabriel Nash (Nick Dormer was on her other side) in refined deprecation. Her sloping back was before them, exempt from retentive stillness in spite of her rigid principles, with the little drama of her lost and recovered shawl ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... garden is converted into front yard, building spot and back yard, containing all the usual necessary appendages to a dwelling place, so that here all traces of former days have passed from the spot, and only live inscribed upon the retentive tablet of Memory. On the east end was another small enclosure where we used to spend our leisure hours in the cultivation of flowers and medicinal plants. Here the tall lilac waved its graceful head beneath our bed-room window, and the morning sun, as he parted the rosy ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... some degree of curliness or waviness to the hair when it is naturally straight, and to render it more retentive of the curl imparted to it by papers or by other modes of dressing it, various methods are often adopted and different cosmetics employed. The first object appears to be promoted by keeping the hair for a time ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... action, must be known, and to be known must be observed; while in other forms of lessons the attention may be diverted for a moment to return to the consideration of exactly what was being observed before. It goes without saying that in one case quick and accurate observation, a retentive memory, and the association of causes and effects follow, and that in the other ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... Testament, and, at the Synagogue school, all the minutiae of the Jewish Law. The pupil was not allowed to write anything down; all was committed to the memory, which in consequence became extremely retentive. The perfect pupil 'lost not a drop from his teacher's cistern.' At the age of about fourteen the boy would be sent to Jerusalem, to study under one of the great Rabbis; in St. Paul's case it was Gamaliel. Under ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... to reach the school ideal, thus force herself to drive hard nails of fact into her vagrant thoughts. And with success. For she had, it turned out, a retentive memory, and to her joy learning by heart came easy to her—as easy as to the most brilliant scholars in the form. From now on she gave this talent full play, memorising even pages of the history book in her zeal; and before many weeks had passed, in all lessons except those in arithmetic—you ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... so happened that, in my schoolboy days, I had joined a class of young fellows who were learning what is called the "Sarvin' of Mass" and had impressed it so accurately on a pretty retentive memory, that I never forgot it. At length, Ned pulled, out his beads, and bedewed himself most copiously with the holy water. He then shouted out, with a voice which resembled that of a man in an ague fit, "Dom-i-n-us vo-bis-cum?" "Et cum spiritu tuo," I replied, in a husky sepulchral tone, from ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... take definite shape while she is speeding on a train to fulfill a concert engagement and she will jot it down in spite of the roar and vibration of railway travel. As the train rushes on the composition may be completely worked out in the composer's mind before the journey's end, and so retentive is Chaminade's memory that, when she returns to her villa in Vesinet, near the forest of St. Germain not far from Paris, she can seat herself at her table and copy the work from that mental vision of it which ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... thing that I am never able to cook anything without the aid of the book. Even if I prepare the same dish seven times a week I must have the printed instructions constantly before me, or I am lost. This is especially strange, because I have a retentive memory for other things. My mind is crammed with odd facts retained from casual reading. If you asked me, the date of the Tai-ping Rebellion (though you're not likely to) I could tell you at once that it originated in 1850 and was ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... must needs have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... parts allotted to Ensign Bellefleur. It did not seem very much, so he felt a little encouraged, and taking Miss Clarissa's advice, set the book open on the table and began learning what he would have to say, while going on with his toilet. He had a really surprisingly retentive memory, and picked up a good bit even in that ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... was a brilliant and persuasive extempore speaker. He possest in high degree faculties essential to great oratory—a capacious mind, retentive memory, logical acumen, vivid imagination, deep concentration, and wealth of language. He had an extraordinary personal fascination, largely due to his broad sympathy ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... property at Sellerhausen near Leipzig. In 1636, his library and MSS. at Sellerhausen having been destroyed by fire, he removed to the Paulinum at Leipzig, where he died on the 17th of September 1658. Barth was a very voluminous writer; his works, which were the fruits of extensive reading and a retentive memory, are unmethodical and uncritical and marred by want of taste and of clearness. He appears to have been excessively vain and of an unamiable disposition. Of his writings the most important are; Adversaria (1624), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... college-friend John Hall Stevenson, whose well-stocked library contained a choice but heterogeneous collection of books—old French "ana," and the learning of mediaeval doctors—books intentionally and books unintentionally comic, the former of which Sterne read with an only too retentive a memory for their jests, and the latter with an acutely humorous appreciation of their solemn trifling. Later on it will be time to note the extent to which he utilized these results of his widely discursive reading, and to examine the legitimacy ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the last fifty years. So far indeed did his information extend, and so acutely retentive was his memory, that he was supposed to be the only man who could have told you who Julius Beaufort, the banker, really was, and what had become of handsome Bob Spicer, old Mrs. Manson Mingott's father, who had disappeared so mysteriously (with a large sum ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... very good girl. She has been to school all this summer, and has learned to read very fluently. She has committed to memory twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters in the Bible. She has a remarkably retentive memory and will make a ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... London the passage, in which he speaks of my illustrious friend. 'I must by no means omit Bolt-court, the long residence of Doctor SAMUEL JOHNSON, a man of the strongest natural abilities, great learning, a most retentive memory, of the deepest and most unaffected piety and morality, mingled with those numerous weaknesses and prejudices which his friends have kindly taken care to draw from their dread abode[802]. I brought on myself his transient anger, by observing that in his tour in Scotland, he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... not affect the senses. Justice should not shut any door that leads to truth. No one will pretend that, because you do not believe in hell, your sight is impaired, or your hearing dulled, or your memory rendered less retentive. A witness in a court is called upon to tell what he has seen, what he has heard, what he remembers, not what he believes about gods and devils and hells and heavens. A witness substantiates not a faith, but a fact. In order to ascertain whether a witness will ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... undesirable. Let us, for example, go back quite beyond the invention of printing and try to imagine a man who had read all the rolls destroyed in the Library of Alexandria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this man to be gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's. Suppose lastly that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us some chosen one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of Euripides. It is incredible that he ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... professors seem to have left any marked influence on his mind or character; indeed they had little opportunity for doing so, for after the first term his attendance at lectures almost entirely ceased. Though never a student, he must have been at all times a considerable reader; he had a retentive memory and quick understanding; he read what interested him; absorbed, understood, and retained it. He left the university with his mind disciplined indeed but not drilled; he had a considerable knowledge ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... among the emotions that grew round that child-like heart; shame, fear, and grief, however they might overshadow it for a time, left no taint of their presence on its bright, fine surface. Tender, perilously alive to sensation, strangely retentive of kindness as she was by nature, the very solitude to which she had been condemned had gifted her, young as she was, with a martyr's endurance of ill, and with a ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Count Platen now proved very serviceable. He passed the examination with great distinction, and in the course of it, to the surprise of the examiners, showed that he could repeat Euclid verbatim,—not by the exercise of the memory, which in Ericsson is not remarkably retentive, but from his perfect mastery of geometrical science. There is no doubt that it is this thorough knowledge of geometry to which he is indebted for his clear conceptions on all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the very next hotel they called at—an old-fashioned house in close proximity to the harbour. There was a communicative landlord there who evidently possessed and was proud of a retentive memory, and he no sooner heard the reason of Gilling's call upon him than he bustled into activity, and produced the register ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... than loamy or heavy lands? We answer—because, in the first place the rains which quickly descend through the open soil, wash down out of the reach of vegetation the soluble fertilizing matters, especially the nitrates, for which the soil has no retentive power; and in the second place, from the porosity of the soil, the air has too great access, so that the vegetable and animal matters of manures decay too rapidly, their volatile portions, ammonia and carbonic acid, escape into the atmosphere, ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... incomparably lucid moments of that brilliant intellect. All the particulars of classic reading which the year before he worked up in the new edition of the Adagia were still at his immediate disposal in that retentive and capacious memory. Reflecting at his ease on all that wisdom of the ancients, he secreted the ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... My memory, if a slow, is a retentive one. I acquire deliberately both knowledge and liking. The acquisition grows into my brain, and the sentiment into my breast; and it is not as the rapid-springing produce which, having no root in itself, flourishes verdurous enough for a time, but too soon falls withered away. Attention, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Practically, does all this help one much? It is possible that some who have passed for the deepest observers of human nature, owed their renown more to an acute observation of the phenomena of feeling, an intuitive knowledge of what people like and dislike, a retentive memory, and a happy knack of making all these available at the right moment, than to any profound reasoning on abstract principles. Like some untaught arithmeticians, their calculations came out correct, but ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... disquisition, and soon turned my thoughts to his other suggestion, a tale. His demands upon me were now frequent, and, to facilitate my labours, I bethought myself of the resource of translation. I had scarcely any convenience with respect to the procuring of books; but, as my memory was retentive, I frequently translated or modelled my narrative upon a reading of some years before. By a fatality, for which I did not exactly know how to account, my thoughts frequently led me to the histories of celebrated robbers; and I related, from time to time, incidents and ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the most deservedly loved men of his generation, fell in the Boer War in 1901. If he had not been a great soldier, Colonel Laurie would have been a great historian. His knowledge of history, more especially of military history, was profound, and his memory was singularly retentive. He had, moreover, a very sound judgment in the marshalling of facts. He had written with a pen of light the history of his regiment, which he loved, and which loved him, and on which in life and in death ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... see its terrible fangs and poison glands. Then, holding its head close up to his lips, he injected the dark saliva into its throat, and once more flung it to the ground. Up to this time he had used no violence—nothing that would have killed a creature so retentive of life as a snake; and I still expected to see the reptile make its escape. Not so, however. It made no effort to move from the spot, but lay stretched out in loose irregular folds, without any perceptible motion beyond a slight quivering ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... he could repeat long portions from the various speeches his father particularly admired; he learned by heart easily and had a retentive memory, and his father had only to say over a sentence two or three times when the child was word perfect. It gave Abel Gallup the most exquisite delight to stand his little son between his knees and hear the stirring, sonorous sentences rolled out in the high, child voice; and even in those ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... several officers, while Count von Nostitz stood near the hearth to take notes. Opposite to Von Moltke sat De Wimpffen alone; while in rear, 'almost in the shade,' were General Faure, Count Castelnau, and other Frenchmen, among whom was a cuirassier, Captain d'Orcet, who had observant eyes and a retentive memory. Then there ensued a brief silence, for Von Moltke looked straight before him and said nothing, while De Wimpffen, oppressed by the number present, hesitated to engage in a debate 'with the two men admitted to be the most ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... though an actor, is ranked among "the British Worthies," was born in London in 1566, and trained at an early period to the stage, for which he was naturally qualified by a stately port and aspect, corporal agility, flexible genius, lively temper, retentive memory, and fluent elocution. Before the year 1592 he seems to have acquired a very considerable degree of popularity in his profession; he was one of the original actors in the plays of Shakespeare, and a principal performer ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... than becomes a head of my age; and my stomach has not recovered its retentive faculty. Leaning forward, particularly to write, does not at present ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... irrigation. Your trees will have difficulty enough in making satisfactory growth on rainfall, and would be prevented from doing so if they had to divide the soil moisture with crops planted between them. The light, deep soils which you mention, resulting from decomposed rock, are not retentive enough, and, even with the large rainfall of your region, may require irrigation to carry trees through the latter summer ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... made by his father, who passed them off as the child's, and illustrate nothing but the paternal vanity. In fact the boy was regarded as something of an infant prodigy. His great powers of memory, characteristic of a mind singularly retentive of all impressions, were early developed. He seemed to learn by intuition. Indolence, as in his after life, alternated with brief efforts of strenuous exertion. His want of sight prevented him from sharing in the ordinary childish sports; and one of his great pleasures was in reading ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... describing Monsignore Berwick in Lothair, says that he "could always, when necessary, sparkle with anecdote or blaze with repartee." The former performance is considerably easier than the latter. Indeed, when a man has a varied experience, a retentive memory, and a sufficient copiousness of speech, the facility of story-telling may attain the character of a disease. The "sparkle" evaporates while the "anecdote" is left. But, though what Mr. Pinto called "Anecdotage" is deplorable, a repartee is always delightful: and, while by no means inclined ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... leaning a little to talk with Miriam as he went. Their pace was regulated by her mother's, who advanced on the arm of Gabriel Nash (Nick Dormer was on her other side) in refined deprecation. Her sloping back was before them, exempt from retentive stillness in spite of her rigid principles, with the little drama of her lost and recovered shawl ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... festivities, on his own account. True, also, that he tumbled into the river, and nearly ended his career at a very early age. Still he survived his river catastrophe; and, though he gained little book learning, possessed such a good and retentive memory, and was so observant, that his mind became stored with vivid impressions of the scenes and surroundings of his youth, which he related with great effect ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... both shopman and bookbinder. From Edinburgh he came to Newcastle. Gilbert had had a liberal education bestowed upon him. He had read a great deal, and had reflected upon what he had read. This, with his retentive memory, enabled him to be a pleasant and communicative companion. I lived in habits of intimacy with him to the end of his life; and, when he died, I, with others of his friends, attended his remains to the grave at ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... man of the world could have used to great advantage. I had independent means, enough to enable me, as a bachelor, to live like a gentleman; I belonged to one of the oldest and best-descended families in the English untitled aristocracy, had a retentive memory, a strong voice, and could speak in public without embarrassment. A man of the world, in my position, would have found his upward course straight before him. He would simply have made use of the Church as an instrument (it is one of the most valuable instruments for the worldly), have given ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... among the number. She had little hope of passing, for most of her subjects were weak, but she meant to make an effort to try to pick up some of her lost ground. Her old enemies, Latin and Chemistry, still often baffled her, and her memory was only moderately retentive. She could not honestly believe that so far as her work was concerned she was any credit to the school. Games were another matter, however, and so long as they did not seriously interfere with her ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... important condition of this system that the sewage, where its quantity is small, shall be stored in tanks until a large volume has accumulated, and that it then be rapidly discharged over the soil. There is no objection to an actual saturation of the ground, provided the soil is not of such a retentive character as to be liable to become puddled, and so made impervious. The tanks being emptied, the flow ceases until they are again filled. During the interval, the liquid settles away in the soil, by which its impurities are removed. ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... often been puzzled to assign a Cause why Women should have this Talent of a ready Utterance in so much greater Perfection than Men. I have sometimes fancied that they have not a retentive Power, or the Faculty of suppressing their Thoughts, as Men have, but that they are necessitated to speak every Thing they think, and if so, it would perhaps furnish a very strong Argument to the Cartesians, for the supporting of their [Doctrine,[2]] that the Soul ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... government of the Third Empire. His alter ego, Georges Mandel, is endowed with qualities which supplement and correct those of his venerable chief. His grasp of detail is comprehensive and firm, his memory retentive, and his judgment bold and deliberate. A striking illustration of the audacity of his resolve was given in the early part of 1918. Marshal Joffre sent a telegram to President Wilson in Washington, and because he had omitted to despatch it through the War Ministry, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... men received their first incentive to ambition and industry and perseverence by reading—when their minds were immature, but fresh and retentive—of the life and achievements of Benjamin Franklin and such other grand models for ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... most exhaustive, but, read in the light of subsequent events, it shows how well-informed he was, and what an impartial mind he brought to bear on the subjects before him. He read very quickly, he could at a glance grasp the salient points of any question, and, having a wonderfully retentive memory, no important detail was lost sight of. He wrote both quickly and clearly, and had the faculty of presenting his points in a lucid manner. Like many military men, who are, when young, taken from their studies, he did not always write in the best of English, but he made up for this in ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... kept either note-book or journal, and as my memory is not a retentive one I have allowed much to escape which I should now vainly attempt to recall. Some things must, however, have made a vivid and durable impression on my mind, as fragments remain, after the lapse of years, far more distinct than occurrences ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... herself to reach the school ideal, thus force herself to drive hard nails of fact into her vagrant thoughts. And with success. For she had, it turned out, a retentive memory, and to her joy learning by heart came easy to her—as easy as to the most brilliant scholars in the form. From now on she gave this talent full play, memorising even pages of the history book in her zeal; and before many weeks had passed, in all lessons except those in arithmetic—you ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... rise on the morning after the night of the bonfires with a clear head and an appetite undiminished by punch; and probably she was the only one at Morristown of whom this could be said. The morning light did not break for her on aching eyelids and a brain at once too retentive of the boasts of the small hours and too sensitive to the perils of the day to come. Colonel John had scarcely passed away under guard, old Darby had scarcely made his first round—with many an ominous shake of the head—the slatternly serving-boys had scarcely ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... players of all grades of chess force who now can play without seeing the board is amazing; a tournament for blindfold play only could well be held. The faculty of playing chess blindfold is thought to apply mostly to those who have extraordinary retentive memories of a peculiar kind, and great powers of abstraction very slightly brought into action or diverted by other pursuits. This seems to be confirmed in considering the great chess exponents who have played blindfold, and those who have not, a comparison ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... case faithfully before the professor, describing not only the dinner in Hornton Street and his interview with Lady Sophia, but also the two sermons he had heard at St. Joseph's, and the rector's lamentable outburst of the previous night. This last, having a remarkably retentive memory, he reproduced in the main in Mr. Harding's own words, omitting only the rector's reference to his moral lapses. During the whole time he was speaking Stepton was closely engaged with the Cambridge marmalade, and showed no symptoms of attention to anything ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... from a model. Instead of getting a man or woman to sit for him in the pose he required, he would go out into the meadows and look at the men and women at their actual daily occupations; and so keen and acute was his power of observation, and so retentive was his inner eye, that he could then recall almost every detail of action or manner as clearly as if he had the original present in his studio before him. As a rule, such a practice is not to be recommended to any one who wishes to draw ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... use of human literature, and a freedom from excessive piety, gave him an immeasurable advantage over all the teachers of the day. Beside most of them, he was as a butterfly to an elephant. A most industrious study of the few works of Aristotle and of the Roman classics that were available, a retentive memory, an ease in manipulating his knowledge, a clear, penetrating mind, with a corresponding clearness of expression, a ready and productive fancy, a great knowledge of men, a warmer interest in things human than in things divine, a laughing contempt for authority, ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... Nimble and Hardy, the Vivacity of whose Spirits, neither Heat can scorch, or dry up, nor Cold benumb or freez; he is Valiant, Watchfull, and Laborious, naturally Cleanly, and of exquisite Scent; Gentle and Loving to man, docile, and of a retentive Memory, and Apt or Fit for the performing any Service wherein man employes him. And for the Use of which I am now speaking (Racing) he ought to be endued with these Qualifications. That he have the Finest Cleanest ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... trust so as to gain the general applause of the university for academical exercises:—And this was the more remarkable, that having turned his thoughts towards the ministry, he carried on his theological studies at the same time, and made great improvements therein, for his memory was so retentive, that he scarcely forgot any thing had heard or read. It was easy and ordinary for him to inscribe any sermon, after he returned to his chamber, at such a length, that the intelligent and judicious reader, who had heard it preached, would ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... viii., p. 44.), I crave leave to say that I never have met with the verb perceyuer except in Hawes, loc. cit.; and I gave the latest use that I could call to mind of the noun in my paper on that word. Unhappily I never make notes, but rely entirely on a somewhat retentive memory; therefore the instances that occur on the spur of the moment are not always the most apposite that might be selected for the purpose of illustration. If, however, he will take the trouble to refer to a little book, consisting of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... very considerable, for in addition to the above-mentioned losses of manure, we require a considerable amount for the demands of the coffee trees, and that, further, it must vary with the amount of the rainfall, and the retentive or non-retentive character of the soil. The crop, it is true, takes comparatively little from the soil, and Mr. John Hughes, Agricultural Chemist, 79, Mark Lane,—points out in his "Reports on Ceylon Soils and Coffee Manures," that 5 cwt. of parchment coffee an acre, which is an average crop over ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... me as a seal upon Thine heart, as a seal upon Thine arm; For love is strong as death; Jealousy (ardent love) is cruel (retentive) as the grave; The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, A ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
... singular proof of Dr Johnson's quick and retentive memory. Hay's translation of Martial was lying in a window. I said, I thought it was pretty well done, and shewed him a particular epigram, I think, of ten, but am certain of eight, lines. He read it, and tossed away the book, saying 'No, it is NOT pretty well.' As I persisted in my opinion, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... some beer, a pint of brandy, a pitcher of water and a glass. He sat eating, drinking, and talking with as much composure as if he had lived with us all his life. I soon perceived that he had a very retentive memory, and was full of anecdote. The Bishop of Llandaff (Dr. Watson) was almost the first word he uttered, and it was followed by his informing us that he had in his trunk a manuscript reply to the bishop's 'Apology for the Bible.' ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... creative. I was easily stimulated to work, and then loved to work; but, unless the stimulus were maintained the natural indolence of my disposition asserted itself, and I wasted my powers in dreams and trifles. My memory was very quick and retentive, in the main, but curiously capricious. I always lacked initiative and decision. At college my successes were continued. I gained medals and prizes, passed my examinations easily, and graduated 'with first-class ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... studied medicine and law without being able to decide on either of the two careers; I had worked for a banker for six months, and my services were so unsatisfactory that I was obliged to resign to avoid being discharged. My studies had been varied but superficial; my memory was active but not retentive. ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... seemed occasionally to tremble with the excess of melody that burdened them played hide-and-seek among the hills, startling whole choruses of deep-throated echoes, and attending and retentive ocean, catching the strains on her beryl strings, bore them whither—and how far? To palm-plumed equatorial isles, where dying auricular nerves mistook them for seraphic utterances? To toiling mariners, tossed helplessly by fierce ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... grasped his stick, and began to climb upward through the thickly growing trees towards the house of the sirens. His instinct had told him upon the terrace that the padrone was there. Uneducated people have often marvellously retentive memories for the things of every-day life. Gaspare remembered the padrone's question about the little light beside the sea, his answer to it, the way in which the padrone had looked towards the trees when, in the dawn, they stood upon the summit of the hill and he pointed out the caves where ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... are an inferior class; and loss of self-respect reacts unfavourably on the moral sense. Ingratitude is a vice attributed to Bengalis by people who have done little or nothing to elicit the corresponding virtue. As a matter of fact their memory is extremely retentive of favours. They will overlook any shortcomings in a ruler who has the divine gift of sympathy, and serve him with devotion. Macaulay has branded them with cowardice. If the charge were true, it was surely illogical and unmanly to reproach a community numbering 50,000,000 for ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... of his life Dr. Shurtleff spent in dignified retirement, in the enjoyment of a competency, and in full exercise of his faculties. He especially enjoyed the visits of former pupils, no one of whom seemed to be lost from his retentive memory, and the annual commencements were always exhilarating reunions to him. His conversation, at such times especially, abounded in anecdote and reminiscences of earlier days, and his cheerfulness ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... deserve to be mentioned, though this catalogue does not claim to be exhaustive. FICUS FASCICULATA, as the title implies, bears its inedible fruit in bundles, branches, trunk, and exposed roots, being alike fertile, and is almost as retentive of life as the cockatoo apple. Opposita is remarkable for varied form of foliage, referred to particularly elsewhere, and for the sweetness of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... or heard; he would, after long intervals, recognize persons whom he had never seen but once or twice. When employed in dictation, he would resume the thread of his discourse without being prompted, after the most vexatious interruptions. His judgment was as sound as his memory was retentive; it was almost infallible,—no one was ever known to have been misled by it. He had a remarkable analytical power, and also the power of generalization. He was a very learned man, and his Commentaries are among the most useful and valued of his writings, showing both learning ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... history could not be written because there was no writing, and when all truth was conveyed in symbolical forms. That means toward a time of narrow experience, and of knowledge far more limited than the present. Memory, in those days, was enormously and abnormally capacious and retentive, but there was no appreciation of humanity. Few lessons from the experiences of others were possible, because the mind was filled with merely tribal legends. What was called early civilization was only relatively ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... theology in preparation for the doctorate which he won at Wittenberg in 1512. Almost immediately he was appointed professor at the university and undertook to lecture on the Psalms. His eloquence and his imagination, his retentive memory enabling him to illustrate his texts by parallel passages drawn from the books of the Old Testament, and in a certain way his exaggerations, his strength of diction, and his asperity of language towards all with whose views he did not find ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... few men have been born with the material for self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but his ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... process of digestion and assimilation, my brain was more a machine-shop than a wareroom; hence capacity of retail dealing was of the smallest. I was not in the least conscious at this time that a large wareroom amply stored by virtue of a retentive memory was not the most needed as an equipment for all the practical affairs of life. I have ever found it necessary to dodge some memories, when there was lack of time to endure ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... him. In giving the senate an account of his mission, one of the ambassadors, Dominic of Treviso, drew the following portrait of Louis XII.: "The king is in stature tall and thin, and temperate in eating, taking scarcely anything but boiled beef; he is by nature miserly and retentive; his great pleasure is hawking; from September to April he hawks. The Cardinal of Rouen [George d'Amboise] does everything; nothing, however, with-out the cognizance of the king, who has a far from stable mind, saying yes and no. . . . I am of opinion that their lordships should ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... a time he was successful. With one arm he was enabled to retain the tree in his powerful hug; while with the other he held the horse—his huge paw, with its retentive claws, being firmly fixed under ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... be,—the organizing head, the vigilant guardian, the seeker's index, the scholar's counsellor? His work is not merely that of administration, manifold and laborious as its duties are. He must have a quick intelligence and a retentive memory. He is a public carrier of knowledge in its germs. His office is like that which naturalists attribute to the bumble-bee,—he lays up little honey for himself, but he conveys the fertilizing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... doughty knight, and last at this end of the bench, is a little man in spectacles, and with a preternatural look of wisdom on his face. He is the Right Hon. Lyon Playfair, and is said to have, next to Mr. Fawcett, the most remarkably retentive memory of any man in the House. Chiltern says he always writes his lectures before he delivers them to the House, sending the manuscript to the Times, and so accurate is his recitation that the editor has only to sprinkle the lecture with "Hear, ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... nervousness or fear, inducing reticence and concealment of faults, excess of modesty or the occasional tendency of persons of genius to underrate their own powers, inattention to studies, want of application, power to learn too easily, lack of retentive memory, exaggeration and boldness, bad temper, sullenness, disposition to quarrel, cowardice, cruelty, caprice as distinct from versatility, selfishness, greediness, laziness, and its various causes, and generally ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... engagement and she will jot it down in spite of the roar and vibration of railway travel. As the train rushes on the composition may be completely worked out in the composer's mind before the journey's end, and so retentive is Chaminade's memory that, when she returns to her villa in Vesinet, near the forest of St. Germain not far from Paris, she can seat herself at her table and copy the work from that mental vision of it which ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... religious belief does not affect the senses. Justice should not shut any door that leads to truth. No one will pretend that, because you do not believe in hell, your sight is impaired, or your hearing dulled, or your memory rendered less retentive. A witness in a court is called upon to tell what he has seen, what he has heard, what he remembers, not what he believes about gods and devils and hells and heavens. A witness substantiates not a faith, but a fact. In order to ascertain whether a witness ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... wanted. It is not sufficient, therefore, in education, to store up knowledge; it is essential to arrange facts so that they shall be ready for use, as materials for the imagination, or the judgment, to select and combine. The power of retentive memory is exercised too much, the faculty of recollective memory is exercised too little, by the common modes of education. Whilst children are reading the history of kings, and battles, and victories; whilst they are learning tables of chronology ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... and, for a boy, is very positive in them and sure about them; but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents, as the case may be. Such as he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school exercises; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, retentive; he is almost passive in the acquisition of knowledge. I say this in no disparagement of the idea of a clever boy. Geography, chronology, history, language, natural history, he heaps up the matter of these studies as treasures for a future day. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... power over given ideas combinations of ideas; genius is the power over those which are not given, and for which no obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or capacity is power of any sort; genius is power of a different sort from what has yet been shown. A retentive memory, a clear understanding, is capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable Crichton was a person of prodigious capacity; but there is no proof (that I know) that he had an atom of genius. His verses ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... finding ill names for great qualities of the mind, which themselves do neither possess, nor can form any just conception of. However, it must be allowed, that an obstinate love of secrecy in this minister seems, at distance, to have some resemblance of cunning; for he is not only very retentive of secrets, but appears to be so too, which I number amongst his defects. He hath been blamed by his friends for refusing to discover his intentions, even in those points where the wisest man may have need of advice and assistance, and some have censured him, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... following legend. I may state that Mr. Jones is a native of Llanfrothen, Merionethshire, a parish in close proximity to the scene of the story. Mr. Jones's informant was his mother, a lady whose mind was well stored with tales of by-gone times, and my friend and informant inherits his mother's retentive memory, as well as her ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... States, were extemporaneous, and allusive to events passing around them. But what was passing around them? The grand events of a spirit-stirring war; occurrences likely to impress themselves, as the mystical legends of former times had done, upon their memory; besides which, a retentive memory was deemed a virtue of the first water, and was cultivated accordingly in those ancient times. Ballads at first, and down to the beginning of the war with Troy, were merely recitations, with an intonation. Then followed a species of recitative, probably with an intoned ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... his generation, fell in the Boer War in 1901. If he had not been a great soldier, Colonel Laurie would have been a great historian. His knowledge of history, more especially of military history, was profound, and his memory was singularly retentive. He had, moreover, a very sound judgment in the marshalling of facts. He had written with a pen of light the history of his regiment, which he loved, and which loved him, and on which in life and in death ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... desirous of the conversation of those from whom any information was to be obtained, but by no means solicitous to improve those opportunities that were sometimes offered of raising his fortune; and he was remarkably retentive of his ideas, which, when once he was in possession of them, rarely forsook him; a quality which could never be ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... a third class of the pupils, whose minds have been better cultivated, and whose memories are more retentive, will not only remember all this, but they will also remember, in connection with each of these subdivisions, many of the more specific events included in, or springing from them, and which carry forward this regular analytical table one step farther. As for example, under the subdivision ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... his narrow hollow temples, and under his soft thatch of silver hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the last fifty years. So far indeed did his information extend, and so acutely retentive was his memory, that he was supposed to be the only man who could have told you who Julius Beaufort, the banker, really was, and what had become of handsome Bob Spicer, old Mrs. Manson Mingott's father, ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... word exhibits the opinion entertained by the Hindoos as to the close connection existing between a powerful intellect and a retentive memory. Such a quality indicates the highest kind of pundit: and it should be recollected that Saraswati is the divinity of wisdom, ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... Solace once of every ill! How I wonder if thou bearest Mivins in remembrance still! If that Friday night is banished Yet from that retentive mind, When the others somehow vanished, And we ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... bloodwood and pandanus, the rain pouring down all day. At two miles from camp a large creek was crossed containing a little rain water, and subsequently nine or ten small deep waterless creeks, their beds too sandy to be retentive. On one of these the wearied party camped at the end of 16 or 17 miles. A range 8 or 9 miles to the East, was sighted during the day. Notwithstanding the rain, barely sufficient water was found at the camp. ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... well even on stiff clays, and in some instances on gumbo soils. But these soils must not be so retentive as to collect and hold water for any considerable time within a few feet of the surface. Such lands have usually much staying power; hence, alfalfa grown on them frequently improves for years after it has been sown. On the reddish soils that cover much of the South, ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... his pulpit, and the title of a bill in a legislative body, are alike made the threads upon which to string the whole knowledge of the speaker upon every subject,—such an apology can scarcely be necessary. It should be said, in deference to a few retentive memories, that two chapters of this story, now embraced in the body of the work, were originally written for and published in the Continental Monthly, last fall, the publication of the whole work through that medium, at first designed, being prevented by a change of management ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... Friday last a centenarian passed away at Whithall, Galway, in the person of Mrs. Catherine Hynes, who had attained the remarkable age of 102. The old lady had a remarkably retentive memory, recalling with ease incidents which occurred three generations ago. Her recollection of Cromwell's campaign ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... for example, go back quite beyond the invention of printing and try to imagine a man who had read all the rolls destroyed in the Library of Alexandria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this man to be gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's. Suppose lastly that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us some chosen one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of Euripides. It is incredible that he could ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Carlyle manfully accomplished his task, and I am inclined to think that the second writing was better than the first; that he probably left out what was unessential, and made a more condensed narrative,—a more complete picture, for his memory was singularly retentive. I do not believe that any man can do his best at the first heat. See how the great poets revise and rewrite. Brougham rewrote his celebrated peroration on the trial of Queen Caroline seventeen times. Carlyle had to rewrite ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... weak spot was the native village, nevertheless. And the business of the man from Diamond Town was to lounge about its neighbourhood, using those sharp light eyes of his to excellent purpose, and storing his retentive memory—for it would not do for a stranger to be caught putting pencil to paper in a town under Martial Law, and bristling with suspicion—with the information indispensable for the putting in effect of young ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... a library of twelve hundred volumes upon chess. I think my deceased friend, Mr. Alfred Denison, collected between two and three thousand upon angling. Of living Englishmen perhaps Lord Acton is the most effective and retentive reader; and for his own purposes he has gathered a library of not less, I ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... there was no necessity, his requirements being always reasonable and only such as she was fully capable of meeting. She had a good mind, quick discernment and retentive memory, and she was quite resolved to be industrious and to keep her promise to her father to be a good girl in every way. Also her ambition was aroused to attempt to overtake her ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... any idea of doing. He wants to produce a sensation, and he leaves a permanent disgust not to be got rid of. Who does not remember odious images that can never be washed out from the consciousness which they have stained? A man's vocabulary is terribly retentive of evil words, and the images they present cling to his memory and will not loose their hold. One who has had the mischance to soil his mind by reading certain poems of Swift will never cleanse it to its original whiteness. Expressions and thoughts of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... be undone. The mistake can never be wholly rectified, for life never yields up what is given it. The look, the word, the invisible atmosphere of the home and church, the sights and sounds of all the busy days enter the super-sensitive and retentive soul of the child and are woven into life tissue. Character has no other from which to fashion itself. Therefore its final beauty and worth will be determined in large measure by the quality of the ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... rice very extensively, and this grain is growing in favor with us. White people generally prefer wheat, which is an excellent grain that has been used by man for thousands of years. It has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and it is so retentive of life that it has started to grow after lying dormant for several thousand years. Truly it is a worthy ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... a retentive memory of the way Miss "Barbarous" had greeted her back in the mountains, stepped toward that much-astonished maiden, opened her red parasol straight in her face, ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... their throats and clinging to their clothes till each looked as though clad in an integument of ragged cotton, or the long loose wool of a merino sheep yet unwoven into cloth. And as they forced their way through it—at times requiring strength to extricate them from its tough retentive hold—they could see the hideous forms of the huge spiders who had spun and woven these strangely patterned webs scuttling off, and from their dark retreats in the crevices of the trees looking defiant and angry ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... 18th, 1829, and received his education at the public school. He was one of the brightest scholars in his class, learned easily, was fond of books, never wearied of study, and never forgot what he acquired. At the start he was blest with a most marvelous and retentive memory, and a keen sense of the practical side of life. "It was thus," as one of his friends has remarked, "that his school days were profitable to him to a degree not common, and it was thus that his rapidly-growing literary attainments ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... set myself to thwart your will Withholding aught of what ye crave to know. First to thee, Io, will I tell and trace Thy scared circuitous wandering mark it well, Deep in retentive tablets of the soul. When thou hast overpast the ferry's flow That sunders continent from continent, Straight to the eastward and the flaming face Of dawn, and highways trodden by the sun, Pass, till thou come unto the windy land Of daughters born to Boreas: beware Lest the strong spirit of ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... found that it was nearly two o'clock—he had informed me that he dined at four—and, not to detain the reader with these details, recurring to a very retentive memory, I found myself, two hours afterward, seated at table with ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... I," said Linda. "From the short acquaintance I have with him I should not call him at all imaginative, but he is extremely quick and wonderfully retentive. You have to show him but once from which cactus he can get Victrola needles and fishing hooks, or where to find ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... These birds have retentive memories. A parrot that belonged to a lady recognised a black servant after three years' absence. Another bird was so fierce that no one in the house liked to touch it, but it would allow a lady visitor to handle it with impunity. It was at last ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... his condescension and affability to the poorest citizens of Mecca: the frankness of his manner concealed the artifice of his views; and the habits of courtesy were imputed to personal friendship or universal benevolence. His memory was capacious and retentive; his wit easy and social; his imagination sublime; his judgment clear, rapid, and decisive. He possessed the courage both of thought and action; and, although his designs might gradually expand with his success, the first idea ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... Most retentive to her, as it had passed, of Huggo's share in all that episode had been that she from her expostulation with Huggo had not come away with the same satisfaction as seemingly had Harry. She put before the boy how ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... detail of this war, very singular skill is manifested. A keen observer of all that passed before him, aided by a most retentive memory, and a fertile imagination, enabled our pilgrim forefather to gain much knowledge in a short time. He had been engaged, as a private soldier, in the Civil war; and was at the siege of Leicester, when it was taken by Prince Rupert. This gave him a knowledge ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to keep his children under his own eye, till they could discern between good and evil; so, with the assistance of his generous master, my father ventured on a small farm on his estate. At those years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... new vision still warm in my heart, I became very active in the parish Sunday School. My inability to read relegated me to the children's class; but I had a retentive memory, and before I was able to read, I memorized about three hundred texts ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... appears, that violent sickness may be excited, and continue for several days without being accompanied by a flow of urine; and it is probable that the latter circumstance did not take place, until the severity of the former abated. If Dr. Cawley had not had a constitution very retentive of life, I think he must have died from the enormous doses he took; and he probably would have died previous to the augmentation of the urinary discharge. For if the root from which his medicine was prepared, was gathered in its active state, he did ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... character of our Saviour in a most affecting and amiable light. I scarcely ever felt more charmed with his excellencies, more grateful for his condescension, or more abased at my own unworthiness; but I lament that my heart is so little retentive of those pleasing ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... deserved ridicule of my friends from the superficial nature of my acquisitions, which being, in the mercantile phrase, got up for society, very often proved flimsy in the texture; and thus the gifts of an uncommonly {p.047} retentive memory and acute powers of perception were sometimes detrimental to their possessor by encouraging him to a presumptuous reliance ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... had shown him all over the establishment (innocently enough, en route, furnishing him with a complete list of his other guests and their rooms: memoranda readily registered by a retentive memory) Lanyard chose the bed-chamber next that occupied by Roddy, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... watched the grim messenger depart, she pressed her hands tightly over her breast to hide from the quick eye of the miser the violent agitation that convulsed her frame, as the recollection of former days flashed upon her too retentive memory. ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... well to put at the bottom of the stone coating a layer of large stones, set on their broadest edges and lengthwise across the road in the form of a pavement. This is called a Telford road, and has advantages over the McAdam road in a soil retentive of moisture, as the layer of large stones operates as an under drain to ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... stars in the Milky Way," quoth Peter, who frequently astonished us by knowing more than any hired boy could be expected to. He had a retentive memory, and never forgot anything he heard or read. The few books left to him by his oft-referred-to Aunt Jane had stocked his mind with a miscellaneous information which sometimes made Felix and me doubt if we knew as much as Peter after all. Felicity was so impressed by ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... this speech as an indication to our government of what was likely to be the course of the Emperor, I determined to retain it in my mind; and, although my verbal memory has never been retentive, I was able, on returning to our legation, to write the whole of it, word for word. In the form thus given, it was transmitted to our State Department, where, a few years since, when looking over sundry papers, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... tones which seemed occasionally to tremble with the excess of melody that burdened them played hide-and-seek among the hills, startling whole choruses of deep-throated echoes, and attending and retentive ocean, catching the strains on her beryl strings, bore them whither—and how far? To palm-plumed equatorial isles, where dying auricular nerves mistook them for seraphic utterances? To toiling mariners, tossed helplessly by fierce typhoons, who, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... saying that I have a retentive memory. Of course I depend very largely upon it for all the small details that Roger has from time to time vouchsafed me in regard to his relations with Margarita, or I could not very well be writing these idle memories, but Roger was always a poor writer—that is to say, so far as comment and ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... As a proof of it, I shall quote from his London the passage, in which he speaks of my illustrious friend. 'I must by no means omit Bolt-court, the long residence of Doctor SAMUEL JOHNSON, a man of the strongest natural abilities, great learning, a most retentive memory, of the deepest and most unaffected piety and morality, mingled with those numerous weaknesses and prejudices which his friends have kindly taken care to draw from their dread abode[802]. I brought on myself his transient anger, by observing that in his tour in Scotland, he once had "long ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... one knew better than he how little regard John M. Hurd really felt for this mercurial youth. Yet Mr. Hurd had resisted with entire success all other means of approach. After all, family connections counted for something, even with the retentive old trolley magnate. So when at last he spoke, it was with the determination to show a part of his hand, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... offence. No allowance is made for the suddenness of surprise, or the strength of temptations. One single failure is presumed to imply the absence of the moral or honourable principle. The memory is retentive on these occasions, and the man's character is blasted for life. Here, even the mere suspicion of having once offended can scarcely be got over: "There is an aukward story about that man, which must be explained before he and I can become acquainted." But ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... heavy soils. The hard indestructible siliceous grains, of which sand is composed, form a soil of an open texture, through which water readily permeates; while clay, from its fine state of division, and peculiar adhesiveness or plasticity, gives it a close-textured and retentive character, and their proper intermixture produces a light fertile loam, each tempering the peculiar properties of the other. Indeed, their mixture is manifestly essential, for sand alone contains little or none of the essential ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... after they had learned a certain thing, in speaking to them she used English for that thing. The Folk, keen-witted and retentive of memory as barbarians often are, made astonishing strides in ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... scholarship, it chanced that this same boy, Grant Harlson, was easily in the lead. His mother, an ex-teacher in another and older State, loving, regardful, tactful, had taught him how to read and comprehend, and he had something of a taste that way and a retentive memory. So, inside the rugged schoolroom, he had a certain prestige. Outside, he ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... mouth, which was somewhat weak. I do not think, however, that any one would have guessed by looking at me as I then appeared at the age of seven and twenty, that I was an exceedingly hard-working man with extraordinary powers of observation and a really retentive memory. ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... while in other forms of lessons the attention may be diverted for a moment to return to the consideration of exactly what was being observed before. It goes without saying that in one case quick and accurate observation, a retentive memory, and the association of causes and effects follow, and that in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... monkey, etc., show the emotions of anger, hate, fear, love, and grief so plainly that "he who runs may read." That these animals possess these emotions is a fact which hardly needs demonstration. They likewise have very retentive memories, sometimes treasuring up an injury for days, months, and years, until an opportunity arrives for them to "get even," thus showing that they ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... favorite cereal. The Chinese and Japanese use rice very extensively, and this grain is growing in favor with us. White people generally prefer wheat, which is an excellent grain that has been used by man for thousands of years. It has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and it is so retentive of life that it has started to grow after lying dormant for several thousand years. Truly it is ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... given under the seal of secrecy, must be esteemed a rich historical legacy. The cardinal's intellect, these envoys tell us, was wonderfully acute. He understood the point at which those who conversed with him were aiming when they had scarcely opened their mouth. His memory was more than usually retentive. He was well educated, and learned not only in Greek, Latin, and Italian, but in the sciences, and especially in theology. He had a rare gift of talking. In the fulfilment of his promises he was less famous. According to one ambassador, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... was its fell agreement signed. He transmitted an oath to De Valence that he would die or win his hire. And immediately dispatching spies to the camp at Roslyn, as soon as he was informed of Wallace's disappearance, he judged, from the knowledge of that chief's retentive affections, that whithersoever he intended finally to go, he would first visit Ellerslie, and the tomb of his wife. According to this opinion, he planted his emissaries in favorable situations on the ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... [a] as in fate) was born in the city of Philadelphia, March 5th, 1842. His parents died while he was still at a tender age, and he was placed with some relatives who resided in the city. From early years he was characterized by quick perceptions and a retentive memory. In the Philadelphia High School, from which he received the academic degree of Master of Arts, he was considered the best scholar in his class, a marked distinction in view of the large numbers which attend that institution. Besides acquiring the usual studies ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... by detale vendi. Retail, by pomalgrande, detale. Retail (trade) detala. Retailer revendisto. Retain gardi, teni. Retainer vasalo. Retaliate revengxi. Retaliation revengxo. Retard prokrasti, malhelpi. Retardation prokrasto, malhelpo. Retentive persista, premorebla. Retina retino. Retinue sekvantaro. Retire reeniri. Retirement kvieteco. Retort respondi, reparoli. Retort (chem. vessel) retorto. Retouch (revise) korekti. Retrace reveni, repasxi. Retract malkonfesi. Retreat (place) rifugxejo. Retreat ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... several years, and became a teacher. He moved to Houston in 1888 and opened a barber shop. Jeptha claims to have been born on Oct. 17, 1835, which would make him 101 years old. He has the appearance of extreme age, but has a retentive memory, and his manner of speaking varies from fairly good English to typical ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... we have not met for many years, I love her as dearly now as when she took me by the hand when a child of eleven years. She conducted her school in a very systematic and orderly manner, and was very particular to require perfect recitations from her pupils; but as I possessed a retentive memory, I found my tasks much lighter than did ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... deeds, habits, character. The force of these words is exemplified in the proper study of music, which results in a rich harvest of self-restraint, self-reliance, industry, patience, perseverance, powers of observation, retentive memory, painstaking effort, strength of mind and character. To possess these qualities at their best abundant thought must be sown. Merely to ring changes on the emotions will not elevate to the heights. The musical education that educates makes of the reasoning powers ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... persons. The reading of book catalogues is a great and never-ending fascination to one who has a love for books. The information thus acquired of the mighty range of the world's literature and science is of inestimable value. Most of it, if retained in a retentive memory, will enable its possessor to answer multitudes of the questions continually put ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... received his education at the public school. He was one of the brightest scholars in his class, learned easily, was fond of books, never wearied of study, and never forgot what he acquired. At the start he was blest with a most marvelous and retentive memory, and a keen sense of the practical side of life. "It was thus," as one of his friends has remarked, "that his school days were profitable to him to a degree not common, and it was thus that his rapidly-growing literary attainments ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... of primary decomposers are thoroughly inoculated with microorganisms that can consume cellulose and lignin. Even though it looks like humus, it has not yet fully decomposed. It does have a water-retentive, granular structure that facilitates the presence of air and moisture throughout the mass creating perfect conditions for microbial ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... purity, and hardness of the wax. Fichte says, "The spirit does not conserve its products,— the single ideas, volitions, and feelings are conserved by the mind and constitute the ground of its inexhaustibly retentive memory. . . . The possibility of recalling what has once been independently done, this remains in the spirit.'' James Sully compares the receptivity of memory with the infusion of dampness into an old MS. Draper also brings a physical example: ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... requirements. A medium loam, underlaid by a heavy loam or a light clay loam, is excellent. Heavy soils give the Spy a greasy skin. Light soils cause the tree to grow upright and to bear fruit of poor flavor. The King likes a soil slightly lighter than the best Greening soils, but retentive of moisture. Hubbardson will utilize the sandiest soil of any northern variety, ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... what was passing around them? The grand events of a spirit-stirring war; occurrences likely to impress themselves, as the mystical legends of former times had done, upon their memory; besides which, a retentive memory was deemed a virtue of the first water, and was cultivated accordingly in those ancient times. Ballads at first, and down to the beginning of the war with Troy, were merely recitations, with an intonation. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... with Ireland if you wish to make it, but you must take her hand at once, for in a few months' time she will not open it to you; the old, bad relations will re-commence, the rancor will be born and grow, and another memory will be stored away in Ireland's capacious and retentive brain. ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... Uncle Philip's narrative in his own language as I took it down in my note-book at the time of my interviews with him. His was indeed a green old age; his mind remarkably clear, and his memory retentive. From time to time, as I read a chapter or a psalm, he often referred to certain passages that he had dwelt upon since I had left him. In relating his history be often shed tears; at one time with his elbows resting upon his knees, and face buried in the calico 'kerchief until it was wet. At another ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... exhibits the opinion entertained by the Hindoos as to the close connection existing between a powerful intellect and a retentive memory. Such a quality indicates the highest kind of pundit: and it should be recollected that Saraswati is the divinity of wisdom, the pundit ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... tables which he laid by the Dauphin's bedside every night before retiring, that the young prince might prepare his lesson before breakfast, did not pacify his accusers. So little Louis Charles was taught no more arithmetic, but he continued to learn eagerly all that was offered his quick retentive mind to assimilate. His playfulness and mischievous pranks were a great comfort to the failing spirits of the king and queen, and the tact he showed in his manner and words were nothing less than wonderful in so young a boy. He never mentioned Versailles or the Tuileries ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... work, he knew the reasons for every bit of labor he performed, and he had not kept his son in ignorance of them. As they worked together the father had explained to the son what he did, and why he did it, The results of their work spoke for themselves, and Hiram had a retentive memory. ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... vaguely towards the shore, Edmund, still reading his letters, apparently unaware of her presence. He was thus able to take a long exposure sun-picture of the white figure on a sensitive memory that would prove but too retentive of the impression. ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... dealing with a book are recommended to those only whose natural memories are not yet made powerfully retentive by the System as a Memory-TRAINER. If, however, a Pupil possesses a good natural memory and a mastery of the System as a Device for memorising, and he has also greatly added to the power of his Concentration as well as his memory by doing all the exercises, ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... "And a highly retentive memory. It seems she was shown over our place in Surrey last summer. She described it to me in the most perfect detail. ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... hardy on dry soils when the winter is of only average severity. But on retentive soils, which are most favourable to the production of fine heads, a severe winter will destroy the plantations unless they have some kind of protection. The usual course of procedure is to cut down the stems and large leaves without ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... relieved. As each knew much which the other was desirous of learning, we exchanged our notions with great delight. I perceived that I had, every day, more of his confidence, and always found new cause of admiration in the profundity of his mind. His comprehension is vast, his memory capacious and retentive, his discourse is methodical, and his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Macquarie. This, with the aid of Yuranigh, our own native, was at length made intelligible to our Barwan guide, and he shaped his course accordingly. He took us through scrubs, having in the centre those holes where water usually lodges for some time after rain, where some substratum of clay happens to be retentive enough to impede the common absorption. But the water in these holes had been recently drunk, and the mud trampled into hard clay by the hoofs of cattle. Thus it is, that the aborigines first become sensible of the approach of the white man. These retired spots, where nature was wont ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... the parts allotted to Ensign Bellefleur. It did not seem very much, so he felt a little encouraged, and taking Miss Clarissa's advice, set the book open on the table and began learning what he would have to say, while going on with his toilet. He had a really surprisingly retentive memory, and picked up a good bit even ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... With a memory as retentive as a printed page, the keen-eyed old wanderer described the landscape league by league, the streams and their direction, the hills which were prominent, the broad stretches of savannah or grassy meadow, the belts of pine forest, the tongues of swamp which had to be ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... of getting a man or woman to sit for him in the pose he required, he would go out into the meadows and look at the men and women at their actual daily occupations; and so keen and acute was his power of observation, and so retentive was his inner eye, that he could then recall almost every detail of action or manner as clearly as if he had the original present in his studio before him. As a rule, such a practice is not to be recommended to any one who wishes to draw with even moderate accuracy; constant study of the actual ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... theology, which was largely tinged by Pagan philosophy, sometimes went so far as to attribute exceptional beauty, or talent, to evil powers; and we are apt to trace them to a merely human source. But keen perception, sound judgment, a retentive memory, a vigorous imagination, and, not least, good common-sense, are among the talents entrusted to us by God Himself, who will by-and-bye take account ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... shall deal with the use in reasoning of such curves, either actually 'plotted' or roughly imagined. In this chapter I point out, firstly, that they can be easily remembered (partly because our visual memory is extremely retentive of the image made by a black line on a white surface) and that we can in consequence carry in our minds the quantitative facts as to a number of variations enormously beyond the possibility of memory if they were treated as isolated instances; and secondly, that we can by imagining such ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... This child which I was was a semi-embryonic creature, mostly unconscious, whose ten years' career, now chiefly faded into entire blankness, showed not many mental traits. The chief were quick and retentive verbal memory, quick, undiscriminating, impulsive, unreasonable kind-heartedness, and an insensibility, even an instinctive opposition, to the approvings or disapprovings of others. Or the child might be stated thus: Nervous and sensitive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... combinations of ideas; genius is the power over those which are not given, and for which no obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or capacity is power of any sort; genius is power of a different sort from what has yet been shown. A retentive memory, a clear understanding, is capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable Crichton was a person of prodigious capacity; but there is no proof (that I know) that he had an atom of genius. His verses ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... into a dress-boot full of cold water. It was a good water-tight boot; and it had faithfully retained all of the water its lining had not soaked up. The gallant officer said a good deal about its retentive properties to ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... graduated at the grammar school, not only first, but perfect, and at once entered the normal school; was very ambitious to sustain her reputation, and studied hard out of school; was slow to learn, but had a retentive memory; could seldom be induced to go to parties, and, when she did go, studied while dressing, and on the way; was assigned extra tasks at school, because she performed them so well; was a fine healthy girl in appearance, but broke down permanently at end of second year, ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... Mrs Lyon was of the middle height, and of a slender form. She had a fair complexion, her eyes were of light blue, and her countenance wore the expression of intelligence. She excelled in conversation; and a retentive memory enabled her to render available the fruits of extensive reading. In old age, she retained much of the buoyant vivacity of youth, and her whole life was adorned ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... hour Detective-inspector Hawke was very busy. He made no written notes. He relied solely upon his marvellous retentive memory, and it was not long before he was in full possession of ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... defied them to deceive him by any dialect, either of the Mashona on the east, or of the Mambari on the west. Mochokotsa then repeated our message twice, to be sure that he had it every word, and went back again. These chiefs' messengers have most retentive memories; they carry messages of considerable length great distances, and deliver them almost word for word. Two or three usually go together, and when on the way the message is rehearsed every night, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... a right eagerly to ask: On this strongly marked temperament, so delicately imaginative and so keenly logical, so receptive and so retentive, a type alike of the philosopher and the poet, the scholar and the musician—on such a contemplative genius, what were the effects of so great and so constant indulgence in a drug noted for its power of heightening ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... His alert and retentive mind had seized, long ago, on Rowlatt's recommendation at the Little Bear Inn, and he had developed, perhaps half consciously, a half sense of humour. A whole sense, however, is not congruous with the fervid beliefs and soaring ambitions of eighteen. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... remarkably retentive, not only of the contents of books, but of all that great outlying fund of anecdote and story which the quaint and earnest New England life always supplied. There were pictures of peculiar characters, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... capacity, especially its very retentive memory for places, I was led to ask myself whether it would not be possible to make a suitably-chosen Bee build in any place that I wished, even in my study. And I wanted, for an experiment of this sort, not an individual but ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... the Bororos were generally long and somewhat confused. They were the outcome of extremely imaginative and extraordinarily retentive minds. Their imagination frequently ran away with them, so that it was not always easy to transcribe the legends so as to render them intelligible to the average reader, unaccustomed to the peculiar way of thinking ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Sellerhausen near Leipzig. In 1636, his library and MSS. at Sellerhausen having been destroyed by fire, he removed to the Paulinum at Leipzig, where he died on the 17th of September 1658. Barth was a very voluminous writer; his works, which were the fruits of extensive reading and a retentive memory, are unmethodical and uncritical and marred by want of taste and of clearness. He appears to have been excessively vain and of an unamiable disposition. Of his writings the most important are; Adversaria (1624), a storehouse of miscellaneous learning, dealing not only ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... manner, a third class of the pupils, whose minds have been better cultivated, and whose memories are more retentive, will not only remember all this, but they will also remember, in connection with each of these subdivisions, many of the more specific events included in, or springing from them, and which carry forward this regular analytical table one step farther. As for example, ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... your ignorance," he said to Dodger. "You have a great deal to learn, but on the other hand you are quick, have a retentive memory, and are very anxious to learn. I shall make ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... most credulous faith. Nor was their trust so much misplaced, for I had, in reality, become a perfect chronicle of all that went forward in Paris—never missing a debate in the Convention, where my retentive memory could carry away almost verbally all that I heard—ever present at every public fete or procession, whether the occasions were some insulting desecration of their former faith, or some tasteless mockery of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Castiglione, may be said to have set the model of good breeding to all Europe, began life under the happiest auspices. From his tutor Odasio of Padua we hear that even in boyhood he cared only for study and for manly sports. His memory was so retentive that he could repeat whole treatises by heart after the lapse of ten or fifteen years, nor did he ever forget what he had resolved to retain. In the Latin and Greek languages he became an accomplished ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... information wherever it could be obtained with limited means and opportunities, and overcame almost insuperable obstacles. His quick perception and powers of observation and reflection, and his retentive memory were remarkable; his judgment was good, his mental grasp and comprehension equal to any emergency, his intentions were always honest, and his skill and tact, with a determination to always maintain ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... I have to remark, said Campuzano, is, that, as I was very attentive, my apprehension very sensitive, and my memory very retentive (thanks to the many raisins and almonds I had swallowed), I got it all by heart, and wrote it down, word for word, the next day, without attempting to colour or adorn it, or adding or suppressing anything to make it attractive. The conversation took place not on ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... in a corner of his mind for the moment; the answer would come to him later on. He had a wonderfully retentive mind. Everything which he saw or heard seemed to make its corresponding impression somewhere in his brain; often without his being conscious of it; and these photographic impressions were always there ready for him when he ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... State three years ago by a disgruntled employee. The police of the country had been searching for him and Mr. Bowe had spent thousands of dollars in the effort to find him. What money and mind and trained detective intelligence failed to do, the retentive memory of the elephant, Sultana, has accomplished and, thanks to her, a grieving father and mother are reunited with their long-lost son. The performance will now continue and you will see what a great degree of intelligence is possessed by these pachyderms ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... spite of the moral certainties of the later guest, it was impossible to prove that Ramsdell was lying flagrantly. One could only smile, and hand in a card, with the agreeable surety that it would be referred to the upstairs potentate and pigeonholed in Ramsdell's retentive memory as ticket for admission later on, or else a permanent rejection label, past all ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... is said to have possessed so retentive a memory, that the day after his arrival at Rome, he could salute every senator and knight ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... important of the later happenings, including the final escape into Holland—are matters of official record and as such have frequently been mentioned in the official dispatches. The more personal details are based on the recollections of Corporal Edwards' retentive mind, aided by his very unusual powers of observation and the rough diary which he managed to retain possession ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... the same manner; and so continued its labour, gathering and burying, as long as the gentleman had patience to watch it. This industry in the squirrel is an instinct which directs it to lay up a store of provision for the winter; and as it is probable that its memory is not sufficiently retentive to enable it to recollect all the spots in which it deposits its acorns, it no doubt makes some slips in the course of the season, and loses some of them. These few spring up, and are, in time, destined to supply the place of the parent ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... heroes Scroggins and Turner; and at the opposite end of the table, a Wake-ful one, but a grosser man than either, and something of the levanter: the bald-headed stag on his right goes by the quaint cognomen of the Japan oracle, from the retentive memory he possesses on all sporting and pugilistic events. The old waiter is a picture every frequenter will recognise, and the smoking a dozer no unusual bit of a spree. Here, my dear Bernard, you have before you a true portrait of the celebrated Daffy{2} ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... was in form, was, without exactly being very brilliant, very inspiring. He had great freshness of expression, and told very few stories, and those only in illustration, never on their own merits. He was very [Greek: mnemonikos], or retentive—the first requisite, says Plato, of a philosopher—and was consequently well supplied with quotations and allusions, not slavishly repeated, but worked naturally in. I do not mean that he passed for a good talker by skilful plagiarizing, but ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to be commended for this purpose than a quantity of lime equivalent in power to do the needed work. Excepting the case of raw soils rich in the remains of plants, most land hardly needs lime for this purpose, it may be, the tillage required for making a seed bed retentive of moisture and for control of weeds being effective, but the point is emphasized that the disintegration of organic matter into available plant food is one of the chief aims of a good farmer. It is only the excessive use of caustic lime that ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... he was both shopman and bookbinder. From Edinburgh he came to Newcastle. Gilbert had had a liberal education bestowed upon him. He had read a great deal, and had reflected upon what he had read. This, with his retentive memory, enabled him to be a pleasant and communicative companion. I lived in habits of intimacy with him to the end of his life; and, when he died, I, with others of his friends, attended his remains to the ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... then, was strong in the virtues of steadfastness and loyalty, on which the social gifts can root deeply and bear perennial fruit. Of these he had rich store. His conversations possessed singular charm; for his melodious voice, facile fancy, and retentive memory enabled him to adorn all topics. His favourite themes were the Greek and Latin Classics. The rooms at Holwood or Walmer were strewn with volumes of his favourite authors, on whom he delighted to converse at length. Grenville declared to Wellesley ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... does all this help one much? It is possible that some who have passed for the deepest observers of human nature, owed their renown more to an acute observation of the phenomena of feeling, an intuitive knowledge of what people like and dislike, a retentive memory, and a happy knack of making all these available at the right moment, than to any profound reasoning on abstract principles. Like some untaught arithmeticians, their calculations came out correct, but they could not have gone through the ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... Bruce, who retained his office only a few days, and the next governor was the Duke of Montague, with Hurd, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, and the Rev. Mr. Arnold, as preceptor and sub-preceptor. During his education, common report spoke highly of the prince's quickness of apprehension, retentive memory, and general aptitude for acquiring the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... support in pain. The mere knowledge of its existence is a light within the mind, and a secret incentive to the best action. Though silent and apart, it is the witness of what is great, and our life is always seeking to rise within its sphere; while, by a secret transference—for souls are not retentive of their own goodness—our standards of living and thinking are maintained at their highest level, like water fed by a distant spring. All this and infinitely more than this was the Queen his mother to Hamlet. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... it was the life which was everlasting because it was typical: the life not which had been relinquished by the one buried there, but the life which the world danced on, forgetful, round his ashes. The Romans, on the contrary, graver and more retentive folk than the Greeks, as well as more domestic, less coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from the Etruscans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a desire unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... conscience. He must have had a natural gift for oratory, aside from his learning and accomplishments and rhetorical arts,—a talent very rare and approaching to creative genius. But to his natural gifts—like Luther, or Henry Clay, born an orator—he added marvellous attainments. He had a most retentive memory. He was versed in the whole history of the world. He was always ready with apt illustrations, which gave interest and finish to his discourses. He was the most industrious and studious man of his age. His attainments were ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... between good and evil; so, with the assistance of his generous master, my father ventured on a small farm on his estate. At those years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... world! She had just been reading Trevelyan's Life of Fox aloud to her mother, who liked occasionally to flavour her knitting with literature, and she began now to revolve a passage from it, describing the upper class of the last century, which had struck that morning on her quick retentive memory: '"A few thousand people who thought that the world was made for them"—did it not run so?—"and that all outside their own fraternity were unworthy of notice or criticism, bestowed upon each other an amount of attention quite inconceivable.... ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... begged Don Quixote, as he seemed to have a retentive memory, to describe and portray to her the beauty and features of the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, for, judging by what fame trumpeted abroad of her beauty, she felt sure she must be the fairest creature in the world, nay, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... considerable embarrassment at the recollection of his share in the debates on the Royal Annuity Bill, but the Prince did not show an equally retentive memory. His seeming forgetfulness of the past and cordiality in the present did more than reassure, it deeply touched and completely won a man who was himself capable of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... absurdity of Dr. Williams's assertion is shown by the fact that on the first and second trials of Mrs. Wharton he affirmed that the violent convulsions, the extreme muscular rigidity, the retentive stomach, seen in the last day of General Ketchum's life were due to tartar emetic, and that to tartar emetic were due the excessive vomiting, the motionless prostration and muscular relaxation of Mr. Van Ness on the Sunday and Monday of his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... fairly well even on stiff clays, and in some instances on gumbo soils. But these soils must not be so retentive as to collect and hold water for any considerable time within a few feet of the surface. Such lands have usually much staying power; hence, alfalfa grown on them frequently improves for years after it has been sown. On the reddish soils that cover ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... and persuasive extempore speaker. He possest in high degree faculties essential to great oratory—a capacious mind, retentive memory, logical acumen, vivid imagination, deep concentration, and wealth of language. He had an extraordinary personal fascination, largely due to ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... mouth open, he ceased to slobber, and acquired the habit of looking respectable. He entered school and became quite proficient in one branch of study in particular—he was an excellent reader, with a wonderfully retentive memory. But he never outgrew his simple-mindedness, and appellation of "Fool" always justly clung to him, for, bright as he seemed to be upon many things, he was incapable of applying his knowledge to his own advantage. George Howe kept abreast with the doings ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... you both, nor any more important or laudable occupation, I will begin to satisfy the repetition of your curiosity. But observe, I promise no more than to begin; for I not only cannot answer that I shall have patience to continue, but my memory is still so fresh, or rather so retentive of trifles which first made impression on it, that it is very possible my life (turned of seventy-one) may be exhausted before my stock of remembrances; especially as I am sensible of the garrulity of old age, and of its eagerness of relating whatever it recollects, whether of moment ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... reacts unfavourably on the moral sense. Ingratitude is a vice attributed to Bengalis by people who have done little or nothing to elicit the corresponding virtue. As a matter of fact their memory is extremely retentive of favours. They will overlook any shortcomings in a ruler who has the divine gift of sympathy, and serve him with devotion. Macaulay has branded them with cowardice. If the charge were true, it was surely illogical and unmanly to reproach a community numbering 50,000,000 for inherited defects. ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... backed by swelling ridges, here open and green- grassed, there spotted with islets of close and shady trees. Mangrove, that horror of the African voyager, shines by its absence; and the soil is not mud, but humus based on gravels or on ruddy clays, stiff and retentive. The formation, in fact, is everywhere that of Eyo or Yoruba, the goodly region lying west of the lower Niger, and its fertility must result from the abundant water supply ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... wet or clayey soil it is well to put at the bottom of the stone coating a layer of large stones, set on their broadest edges and lengthwise across the road in the form of a pavement. This is called a Telford road, and has advantages over the McAdam road in a soil retentive of moisture, as the layer of large stones operates as an under drain to the stone ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... Monsignore Berwick in Lothair, says that he "could always, when necessary, sparkle with anecdote or blaze with repartee." The former performance is considerably easier than the latter. Indeed, when a man has a varied experience, a retentive memory, and a sufficient copiousness of speech, the facility of story-telling may attain the character of a disease. The "sparkle" evaporates while the "anecdote" is left. But, though what Mr. Pinto called "Anecdotage" is deplorable, a repartee is always delightful: and, while by no ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... deservedly loved men of his generation, fell in the Boer War in 1901. If he had not been a great soldier, Colonel Laurie would have been a great historian. His knowledge of history, more especially of military history, was profound, and his memory was singularly retentive. He had, moreover, a very sound judgment in the marshalling of facts. He had written with a pen of light the history of his regiment, which he loved, and which loved him, and on which in life and in death he ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... advantage. I had independent means, enough to enable me, as a bachelor, to live like a gentleman; I belonged to one of the oldest and best-descended families in the English untitled aristocracy, had a retentive memory, a strong voice, and could speak in public without embarrassment. A man of the world, in my position, would have found his upward course straight before him. He would simply have made use ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... of being turned out made him for the nonce refrain from that vengeance of abuse which his education as a Dublin Jackeen well qualified him to inflict. But he put down the man's face in his retentive memory, and made up his mind ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... possible to live with a more agreeable man than Luttrell. He is difficult to please, but when pleased and in good spirits, full of vivacity. He has a lively imagination, a great deal of instruction, and a very retentive memory, a memory particularly happy for social purposes, for he recollects a thousand anecdotes, fine allusions, odd expressions, or happy remarks, applicable to the generality of topics which fall under discussion. He is extremely sensitive, easily disconcerted, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... translated by him three years before, may have suggested the theme. It must have been in the incomparably lucid moments of that brilliant intellect. All the particulars of classic reading which the year before he worked up in the new edition of the Adagia were still at his immediate disposal in that retentive and capacious memory. Reflecting at his ease on all that wisdom of the ancients, he secreted the ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... the household utensils in Millet's childhood's home were such as he never saw elsewhere, and always remembered with pleasure. The ways of doing the work in Greville were not altogether like the ways of Barbizon, and Millet's observant eye and retentive memory noted these differences with interest. When he revisited his home in later life, he made careful sketches of some of the jugs and kitchen utensils used in the family. He even carried off to his Barbizon studio one particular ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... applause for his fine singing and playing the piano, began telling the company about the strange convict who had converted the hangman. Mahin told his story very accurately, as he had a very good memory, which was all the more retentive because of his total indifference to those with whom he had to deal. He never paid the slightest attention to other people's feelings, and was therefore better able to keep all they did or said in his memory. He got interested in Stepan Pelageushkine, and, although he did not thoroughly ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... never kept either note-book or journal, and as my memory is not a retentive one I have allowed much to escape which I should now vainly attempt to recall. Some things must, however, have made a vivid and durable impression on my mind, as fragments remain, after the lapse of years, far more distinct than occurrences of much more ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the amount of information they displayed concerning women, what retentive memories they had, and how very familiar they were with the subject of woman, her ways, and her sex nature. Their mental horizon was bounded on the north by the affairs of the ranch, on the east ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... mouth have a brush-like surface, like a whale's in miniature: it is said to eat small fish. A bony spine rises on its back (I suppose for defence), which is 2-1/2 inches long, and as thick as a quill. They are very retentive of life. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... of the roots. Calcareous soils are, upon the whole, the most favourable to the growth of plants: soils are, therefore, usually improved by chalk, which, you may recollect, is a carbonat of lime. Different vegetables, however, require different kinds of soils. Thus rice demands a moist retentive soil; potatoes a soft sandy soil; wheat a firm and rich soil. Forest trees grow better in fine sand than in a stiff clay; and a light ferruginous soil is best ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... going about in every direction after cows and oxen, he learned the roads so well that he could make a very good map of them. Everything that could be of service to the American cause was jotted down in Honeyman's retentive memory; and when he had found out everything that he could find out, he thought it was fully time that he should acquaint Washington with the state of ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... important indications.[49] A comparison with my mother's contemporary account of the incidents common to both proves my brother's narrative to be remarkably accurate. Indeed, though he disclaimed the possession of unusual powers of memory in general, he had a singularly retentive memory for facts and dates, and amused himself occasionally by exercising his faculty. He had, for example, a certain walking-stick upon which he made a notch after a day's march; it served instead of a diary, and years afterwards he would explain ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... will spare me even for that," returned Grace, with a sudden conviction that her mother's memory was retentive, and that she would be punished in that way for her sins of this evening; "but promise me, Archie, that you will come, if it be only for ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... the size of its particles and their relation to each other. The following terms are used in describing soil textures: Coarse, fine, open, close, loose, hard, stiff, compact, soft, mellow, porous, leachy, retentive, cloddy, lumpy, light, heavy. Which of these terms will apply to the texture of sand, which to clay, which to humus, which to the garden soil, which to a soil that plant roots can easily penetrate? We find ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... sonorous Blackmore's strain; Walls, steeples, skies, bray back to him again. 260 In Tottenham fields, the brethren, with amaze, Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze; 'Long Chancery Lane retentive rolls the sound, And courts to courts return it round and round; Thames wafts it thence to Rufus' roaring hall, And Hungerford re-echoes bawl for bawl. All hail him victor in both gifts of song, Who sings so loudly, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... to with a mixture of contempt for my want of taste, and astonishment at my presumption. But before the reply had time to burst out from lips, at no time too retentive, I was told, that at the end of one week more I should be suffered to take my way; that week being devoted to a round of especial entertainments in honour of my brother's election; the whole to be wound up by that most preposterous of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; If I know this, know all the world beside, That part of tyranny that I do bear, I can shake off ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... little from droughts at Aldington, the land was naturally so retentive of moisture, but 1893 was a dry year, not easily forgotten; no rain fell from early in March to July 13; the hay crop was the lightest in remembrance, and straw was so short and scarce that the hay-ricks of the following year, 1894, had to go unthatched until ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... was hardly a manufacturing city then, and the great rim of outlying factories that now besmirch the white stone of its house fronts had not come into existence, the atmosphere being as clear as in the country. A naturally retentive memory is apt to store up perfectly useless items of information. What possible object can there be to my remembering that the engine which hauled us from Calais to Paris in 1865 was built by J. Cail of ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... fear, inducing reticence and concealment of faults, excess of modesty or the occasional tendency of persons of genius to underrate their own powers, inattention to studies, want of application, power to learn too easily, lack of retentive memory, exaggeration and boldness, bad temper, sullenness, disposition to quarrel, cowardice, cruelty, caprice as distinct from versatility, selfishness, greediness, laziness, and its various causes, and generally the germs of all faults ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... the surface. If by chance this comes naturally, so much the better, but otherwise the land must be tile-drained. Sloping land is by no means always well drained, many hillsides having a subsoil so impervious or so retentive of moisture that under-drainage is a necessity. The texture of the land is usually improved so greatly by good drainage that the grower has little need to rely on the clemency of the season in carrying on vineyard cultivation ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... which is related to the tain group (see below), has a key-syllable that means holding: tenant, tenement, tenure, tenet, tenor, tenable, tenacious, contents, contentment, lieutenant, maintenance, sustenance, countenance, appurtenance, detention, retentive, pertinacity, pertinent, continent, abstinence, continuous, retinue. The second has a key-syllable that means stretching: tend, tender, tendon, tendril, tendency, extend, subtend, distend, pretend, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and irreverent. The lawyers and other professional men were to be found, for the most part, in Paris and in the towns. They had their livelihood in the irregularities of society, and, as a class, were retentive of ancient custom and present social habits. Although by birth they belonged in the main to the third estate, they were in reality adjunct to the first, and consequently, being integral members of neither, formed a strong independent class by themselves. The petty nobles were ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... balsams and quintescence, and pervaded at the same times with full springing tides of the invigorating influences of music and magnets both real and artificial, gives such elastic vigour to the nerves, on the one hand, of the male, and on the other, such retentive firmness to the female; and, moreover, all the faculties of the soul being so fully expanded, and so highly illuminated, that it is impossible, in the nature of things, but that strong, beautiful, brilliant, nay, double-distilled ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... virtues, which, if we had been rightly educated, we should have practised from our earliest youth with as much facility as we read or write. If a child is to learn grammar, let him commence, every one will say, when young, while his memory is most retentive. If we are to teach him those principles which are to shape his destiny in life, and have their home in the heart, should we wait till it is least susceptible of impression? It cannot be denied that too much indifference prevails on this subject. We ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... Dame Hinkley, which bade them "let Brother Stevens be;" and, already had Brother Stevens himself, ventured upon the use of sundry grave saws from the holy volume, the fruit of early reading and a retentive memory, which not a little helped to maintain his novel pretensions in the mind of the brethren, and the worthy teacher, John Cross himself. All things promised a long duration to a friendship suddenly begun; when William Hinkley, the younger, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... just enough of the love of a romantic and strange life, to help him battle successfully with the incidents and privations common to such as settle in a new country, with but little capital. He worked his way through. He had a very retentive memory and possessed the faculty of pleasing his visitors, to ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... exquisite pleasure. Such a reader was Grace Darling. She was not able to procure many books, for their library, though good, was small, but those which were in her power she "read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested." She had a retentive memory, and there is no doubt that to read as she did, was really of more advantage to her than it would have been had she subscribed to Mudie, and seen all the new novels of the day. She was fond of romance, being romantic herself; and the legends and traditions of heroic Northumberland ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... (a slow but, perhaps retentive mind), all the bearings of the place, and all its opportunities, and even the curve of the stream along it, and the bushes near the door, I was much inclined to go farther up, and understand all the village. But a bar of red ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... a hatchet-faced dame with a venomous tongue and a retentive memory, "Morley's fond of children, although he has none of ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... years of his life Dr. Shurtleff spent in dignified retirement, in the enjoyment of a competency, and in full exercise of his faculties. He especially enjoyed the visits of former pupils, no one of whom seemed to be lost from his retentive memory, and the annual commencements were always exhilarating reunions to him. His conversation, at such times especially, abounded in anecdote and reminiscences of earlier days, and his cheerfulness survived to the end. He has seldom, of late years, taken part in any public service, the ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... his own account. True, also, that he tumbled into the river, and nearly ended his career at a very early age. Still he survived his river catastrophe; and, though he gained little book learning, possessed such a good and retentive memory, and was so observant, that his mind became stored with vivid impressions of the scenes and surroundings of his youth, which he related with ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... could not be written because there was no writing, and when all truth was conveyed in symbolical forms. That means toward a time of narrow experience, and of knowledge far more limited than the present. Memory, in those days, was enormously and abnormally capacious and retentive, but there was no appreciation of humanity. Few lessons from the experiences of others were possible, because the mind was filled with merely tribal legends. What was called early civilization was only relatively splendid. There was unsurpassed poetry but no science, ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... was a tall and well proportioned woman, of commanding presence and cheerful disposition; a woman of more than ordinary intelligence, and a good conversationalist. She had been a close observer of passing events, and possessed a wonderfully retentive memory. It was an epoch in one's life to hear her recount the recollections of her early days. These ran through the whole period of the American War, and many scenes which are now historical, that she had witnessed, or was cognizant of, were given with a vividness ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... that I am never able to cook anything without the aid of the book. Even if I prepare the same dish seven times a week I must have the printed instructions constantly before me, or I am lost. This is especially strange, because I have a retentive memory for other things. My mind is crammed with odd facts retained from casual reading. If you asked me, the date of the Tai-ping Rebellion (though you're not likely to) I could tell you at once that it originated in 1850 ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... what interested him; he did not study them for complete mastery; and many and varied as are the traces of his literary interests, they have the air of being detached fragments that have stuck in a plastic and retentive mind, not pieces of systematic erudition. It is true that many books have been written to show that Shakespeare had the knowledge of a professional in law, medicine, navigation, theology, conveyancing, hunting and hawking, horsemanship, politics, and other fields; ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... small loans from most of his male acquaintances, rarely repaying the same. He had a tendency to forget that he had borrowed half-a-crown here to pay a cab and ten shillings there to settle up for a dinner; and his memory was not much more retentive of larger sums. This made his friends somewhat wary. The consequence was that the great treasure-hunt was a failure from start to finish. He got friendly smiles. He got honeyed apologies. He got earnest assurances of good-will. But he got no money, ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... it not possible that here Mr. Collier's remarkable memory is too retentive, and that, though second thoughts may be best, first thoughts are sometimes inconveniently remembered to the prejudice of the second?"[N] Here we see a palpable slip of memory or of the pen, by which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... than his memory. After this exploit (enough for one man), Thomas Westwood seems to have subsided into a less hazardous occupation; and in the twenty-fifth year of his age we find him a haberdasher in Bow Lane: yet still retentive of his early riding (though leaving it to rawer stomachs), and Christmasly at night sithence to this last, and shall to his latest Christmas, hath he, doth he, and shall he, tell after supper the story of the insane steed ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... reading which was absolutely necessary for the accumulation of authorities, and which alone may account for Johnson's retentive mind being enriched with a very large and various store of knowledge and imagery, must have occupied several years. The Preface furnishes an eminent instance of a double talent, of which Johnson was ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Merlin. The circumstance to which you allude was beyond my control, and Mr.—a—Word's share in it without my consent; his service was, I believe, well repaid by my father; and the trouble with me is not that my memory is defective, but rather that it is too retentive. I remember the ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... child of whom his father said once that he had never had any boyhood days in the ordinary sense, were early noted in his fondness for building little plank roads out of the debris of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily retentive memory was shown in his easy acquisition of all the songs of the lumber gangs and canal men before he was five years old. One incident tells how he was found one day in the village square copying laboriously the signs of the stores. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... consciousness are the same thing under different names. A lively sensation, in which the mind is entirely occupied, becomes attention, without the necessity of assuming an additional special faculty in the mind. Attention, by its retentive effect on the sensation, becomes memory. Double attention—to a new sensation, and to the lingering trace of the previous one—is comparison; the recognition of a relation (resemblance or difference) between two ideas is judgment; the separation of an idea from another naturally connected ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... was in scenes of travel or adventure in the great unbroken regions sought out by the fur trade, their retentive memories reproducing by the winter fireside or summer camp pictures so graphic as to ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... demons; it makes wise the simple by keeping the mind in a healthy condition; it enables a man to come off clear from a judicial inquiry; it qualifies him both to learn and to teach the law; it makes him eagerly listened to, to have a retentive memory, etc. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... by my minute description to be able to stir the memory of one or other of the dozens of uniformed hall-porters whom I interviewed. The majority of such men have a remarkably retentive memory for a face, due to long cultivation, just as that possessed by one's club hall-porter, who can at once address any of the thousand or ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... attire, strolled up towards the crowd, but stood somewhat aloof and outside of it. The market people pressed closer and closer round the platform, listening with mouths open and eager eyes to the sermon, storing it away in their retentive memories, which would reproduce every word of it when they sat round the fireside in the coming ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
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