From Wikimedia user Cmglee: If the history of the universe were recounted backward in a 138-page book, with 100 lines on each page and 100 letters in each line, written human history would occupy half a letter. Everything involving humans would lie on the first line; the dinosaurs would die out on the first page; and by page 10 the most complex lifeforms would be green algae.

For comparison, if the universe had begun in 4004 B.C., at this scale its history would occupy six-tenths of a letter.

A phonetic mnemonic for the first 32 U.S. presidents, by Edwin C. Silvey:

I don’t know where this first appeared, but every source I can find faithfully credits the composer.

I take delight in history, even its most prosaic details, because they become poetical as they recede into the past. The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are to-day, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like a ghost at cock-crow. This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical, and the knowledge of it has never ceased to entrance me, and to throw a halo of poetry round the dustiest record that Dryasdust can bring to light.

— G.M. Trevelyan, Autobiography and Other Essays, 1949

Another and still more amusing instance of self-revelation may be found in a manuscript familiar to many who have visited the Bodleian Library at Oxford. There, among other precious treasures, is a collection of notes scribbled by Charles II. to Clarendon, and by Clarendon to Charles II., to beguile the tedium of Council. They look, for all the world, like the notes which school-girls are wont to scribble to one another, to beguile the tedium of study. On one page, Charles in a little careless hand, not unlike a school-girl’s, writes that he wants to go to Tunbridge, to see his sister. Clarendon in larger, firmer characters writes back that there is no reason why he should not, if he can return in a few days, and adds tentatively, ‘I suppose you will go with a light train.’ Charles, as though glowing with conscious rectitude, responds, ‘I intend to take nothing but my night-bag.’ Clarendon, who knows his master’s luxurious habits, is startled out of all propriety. ‘Gods!’ he writes: ‘you will not go without forty or fifty horse.’ Then Charles, who seems to have been waiting for this point in the dialogue, tranquilly replies in one straggling line at the bottom of the page. ‘I count that part of my night-bag.’

— Agnes Repplier, Essays in Idleness, 1893