raisonne_ of these manuscripts, and the valuable additions to the
notices of them by Assemani and Talmar which it contains, are all the
fruit of Mezzofanti's labour as librarian.

During his occupancy of this office, too, he continued to hold his
professorship of Oriental languages, and, for a considerable part of
the time, that of Greek literature in addition. Nor was he exempt from
those domestic cares and anxieties which are often the most painful
drawback upon literary activity. The death of a brother, which threw
upon him the care of an unprovided family of eleven children, was the
severest trial sustained in Mezzofanti's otherwise comparatively quiet
career; and by driving him to the ordinary expedient of distressed
scholars--that of giving private lectures--it tended more than all his
public occupations to trench upon his time, and to abridge his
opportunities of application to his favourite study.

Perhaps, indeed, of all who have ever attained to the same eminence in
any department which Mezzofanti reached in that of languages, there
hardly ever was one who had so little of the mere student in his
character. In the midst of these varied and distracting occupations,
he was at all times most assiduous in his attendance upon the sick in
the public hospitals, of which he acted as the chaplain. There was
another also of his priestly duties, for the zealous discharge of
which he was scarcely less distinguished, and which became subsidiary,
in a very remarkable way, to his progress in the knowledge of
languages. In the absence, up to the present time, of any regular
memoir of him, it is impossible to fix with precision the history of
his progress in the acquisition of the several languages. But it is
well known, that at a very early period he was master of all the
leading European languages, and of those Oriental tongues which are
comprised in the Semitic family. Very early, therefore, in
Mezzofanti's career, he was marked out among the entire body of the
Bolognese clergy as in an especial manner the 'foreigners' confessor'
(_confessario dei forestieri_). In him, visitors from every quarter of
the globe had a sure and ready resource; and in several cases, it was
to the very necessity thus created he was indebted for the
acquisition, or at least the rudimentary knowledge, of a new language.
More than once, it occurred that a foreigner, introduced to the
_confessario dei forestieri_, for the purpose of being confessed,