74. 'Few,' he says,
'have reason to complain of nature as unkindly sparing of the gifts of
memory ... The true art of memory is the art of attention.' See
_ante_, iii. 191.
[410]The first of the definitions given by Johnson of _to remember_ is
_to bear in mind anything; not to forget. To recollect_ he defines _to
recover to memory_. We may, perhaps, assume that Boswell said, 'I did
not recollect that the chair was broken;' and that Johnson replied, 'you
mean, you did not remember. That you did not remember is your own fault.
It was in your mind that it was broken, and therefore you ought to have
remembered it. It was not a case of recollecting; for we recollect, that
is, recover to memory, what is not in our mind.' In the passage _ante_,
i. 112, which begins, 'I indeed doubt if he could have remembered,' we
find in the first two editions not _remembered_, but _recollected_.
Perhaps this change is due to euphony, as _collected_ comes a few lines
before. Horace Walpole, in one of his _Letters_ (i. 15), distinguishes
the two words, on his revisiting his old school, Eton:--'By the way, the
clock strikes the old cracked sound--I recollect so much, and remember
so little.
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