My brief and casual intercourse with the Cardinal would not entitle me to speak of his character and disposition, were it not that my impressions are but an echo of all that has been said and written before me, of his cheerful courtesy, his open-hearted frankness, and his unaffected good nature. To all his visitors of whatever degree, he was the same—gay, amiable, and unreserved. With him humility was an instinct. It seemed as though he never thought of himself, or of any claim of his to consideration. He would hardly permit the simple mark of respect—the kissing of the ring which ordinarily accompanies the salutation of one of high ecclesiastical dignity in Italy; and his demeanour was so entirely devoid of assumption of superiority that the humblest visitor was at once made to feel at home in his company.
His conversation was uniformly gay and cheerful, and no man entered more heartily into the spirit of any little pleasantry which might arise. On one occasion, upon a melting summer day, as he was shewing the magnificent Giulio Clovio Dante, in the Vatican library, to a well-known London clergyman, the latter, in his delight at one of the beautiful miniatures by which it is illustrated—a moonlight scene—was in the act of pointing out with his moist finger some particular beauty which struck him, when Mezzofanti, horror-struck at the danger, caught his arm.
“Softly, my dear Doctor,” he playfully interposed: “these things may be looked at with the eyes, but not with the fingers.”
He delighted, too, in puns, and was equally ready in all languages. He laughed heartily at Cardinal Rivarola’s Italian pun against himself, about the orecchini;[531] and one day, while he was speaking German with Guido Görres, the latter having made some allusion to his Eminence’s increasing gray hairs, and spoken of him as a weiss-haar (white-haired,)
“Ach!” he replied with a gentle smile, not untinged with melancholy;—“ach! gäbe Gott dass ich, wie weiss-haar, so auch weiser geworden wäre.”[532]
It will easily be inferred from this, that, among etymologies, he was especially attracted by those which involved a play upon words:—if they admitted a pun so much the better. He was much amused by Herr Fleck’s suggestion, that the name Mezzofanti, was derived from Ἑν μέσῳ φαίνεται; and Cardinal Wiseman told me that once, after learnedly canvassing the various etymologies suggested for Felsina, the ancient name of his native city, Bologna, he laughingly brought the discussion to a close by suggesting that probably it was Fé l’asina, (the ass made it.)
Probably it was to this taste he was indebted for that familiarity with Hudibras—a writer, otherwise so unattractive to a foreigner—which took Mr. Badeley by surprise.