with which his
acquaintance was more limited than with the rest; an avowal the
honesty of which will be best appreciated when it is considered, on
the one hand, how difficult it would have been to test his knowledge
of the vast majority among these languages; and, on the other, how
marvellously perfect was his admitted familiarity with those which he
did profess really to know.

The author of the memoir submitted to the Philological Society, has
collected a number of notices of Mezzofanti by travellers in Italy,
who had seen him at different periods of his career. Mr Stewart Rose,
in 1817, tells of him that a Smyrniote servant, who was with him,
declared that he might pass for a Greek or a Turk throughout the
dominions of the Grand Seignior. A few years later, while he was still
residing at Bologna, he was visited by the celebrated Hungarian
astronomer, Baron Zach, editor of the well-known _Correspondences
Astronomiques_, on occasion of the annular eclipse which was then
visible in Italy. 'This extraordinary man,' writes the baron, February
1820, 'speaks thirty-two languages, living and dead--in the manner I
am going to describe. He accosted me in Hungarian, with a compliment
so well-turned, and in such excellent Magyar, that I was quite taken
by surprise. He afterwards spoke to me in German, at first in good
Saxon, and then in the Austrian and Swabian dialects, with a
correctness of accent that amazed me to the last degree, and made me
burst into a fit of laughter at the thought of the contrast between
the language and the appearance of this astonishing professor. He
spoke English to Captain Smyth, Russian and Polish to Prince
Volkonski, with the same volubility as if he had been speaking his
native tongue.' As a last trial, the baron suddenly accosted him in
_Walachian_, when, 'without hesitation, and without appearing to
remark what an out-of-the-way dialect had been taken, away went the
polyglot with equal volubility;' and Zach adds, that he even knew the
Zingller or gipsy language, which had long proved a puzzle to himself.
Molbech, a Danish traveller, who had an interview with him in 1820,
adds to his account of this miraculous polyglotist, that 'he is not
merely a linguist, but is well acquainted with literary history and
bibliography, and also with the library under his charge. He is a man
of the finest and most polished manners, and at the same time, of the
most engaging good-nature and politeness.'

It wou