A failure so unusual for Mezzofanti, and in so many languages, could not but prove a stimulus to the industry of this indefatigable student. He was at the moment busily engaged in the revision of the Maronite and Armenian liturgies;—a circumstance, by the way, which perhaps may account for his passing over without notice, M. d’Abbadie’s proposal about the Galla language;—but, a few months later, he addressed himself to the Amarinna with all the energy of his most youthful days. How it ended, we shall see.
In the close of July, 1841, when I first had the honour of seeing him, he was surrounded by a group of Abyssinians, who had just come to Rome under the escort of Monsignor de Jacobis, the apostolic Prefect of the Abyssinian mission. These Abyssinians were all reputed to be persons of distinction among their countrymen, and several of the number were understood to be professors and men of letters. The Cardinal was speaking to them freely and without embarrassment; and his whole manner, as well as theirs, appeared to me (so far as one entirely unacquainted with the language could judge) to indicate that he spoke with ease, and was understood by them without an effort. Thinking it probable, however, that M. d’Abbadie during his second sojourn in Abyssinia, must have known something of this mission, I thought it well to write to him on the subject. He informed me, in reply, that the Abyssinians whom I had thus seen were a deputation of the schismatical Christians of that country, who had been sent by the native chieftains to Alexandria, to obtain from the Patriarch (to whom they so far recognise their subjection) the consecration of the Abun, or Primate, of their national church. Father de Jacobis, who was their fellow-traveller as far as Alexandria, induced them to accompany him to Rome, where they were so much struck with all that they saw and heard, that “two out of the three professors of Gondar, who were the leaders of the deputation, have, since their return, freely and knowingly entered the one true Church—Amari, Kanfu, and the one-eyed professor, Gab’ra Mikaël.” One of these told M. d’Abbadie that “Cardinal Mezzofanti conversed very well with him in Amarinna, and that he also knew the Gi-iz language.” He had thus learned the Amarinna between 1839 and 1841.
I am indebted to M. d’Abbadie for an account of another still later acquisition of the Cardinal’s declining years. Before the summer of 1841, he had acquired the Amarinna language. Now at that time he was actually engaged, with all the energy of his early years, in the study of the proverbially “impossible”[510] Basque, in which, as we have seen, M. d’Abbadie found him a novice in 1839.
One of my companions in Rome in 1841, the lamented Guido Görres, of Munich, son of the venerable author of that name, and himself one of the most accomplished writers of Catholic Germany, having chanced to say to the Cardinal that he was then engaged in the study of Basque, the latter proposed that they should pursue it in company. Their readings had only just commenced when I last saw Herr Görres; but M. d’Abbadie’s testimony at a later date places the Cardinal’s success in this study likewise entirely beyond question. He had not only learned before the year 1844, the general body of the language, but even mastered its various dialects so as to be able to converse both in the Labourdain and the Souletin; which, it should be observed, are not simply dialects of Basque, but minor sub-divisions of one out of the four leading dialects which prevail in the different districts of Biscay and Navarre.
“My friend M. Dassance,” says M. d’Abbadie, “who has published several works, and who, after declining a bishopric, is still a canon in the Bayonne Cathedral, told me the other day, that, on visiting the Cardinal in 1844, he was surprised to hear him speak French with that peculiar Parisian accent which pertains to the ancient nobility of the Faubourg St. Germain. This is a nice distinction of which several Frenchmen are not aware. On hearing that Dassance was a Basque, the Cardinal immediately said: Mingo zitugu? (verbatim—‘Of whence have we you’?) thus shewing that he had mastered the tremendous difficulty of our vernacular verb. The ensuing conversation took place in the pure Labourdain dialect, which is spoken here (at Urrugne,) but one of the professors of the Bayonne Seminary, Father Chilo, from Soule, avers that the Cardinal spoke to him in the Souletin dialect.”[511]
I afterwards shewed to M. d’Abbadie a short sentence in Basque which the Cardinal wrote with his own hand, and which is printed among the fac similes prefixed to this volume.
Tauna! zu servitzea da erreguiñatea;
Zu maitatzea da zoriona,
“Lord! to serve Thee is to reign;