As to Biblical Criticism, he had no idea of it. His knowledge of Greek criticism too was very shallow.
In short, his linguistic talent was that of seizing sounds and accents, and the whole (so to say) idiom of a language, and reproducing them by a wonderful, but equally special, memory.
I do not think he had ever his equal in this respect.
But the cultivation of this power had absorbed all the rest.
Let it, however, never be forgotten that he was, according to all I have heard from him, a charitable, kind Christian, devout but not intolerant, and that his habitual meekness was not a cloak, but a real Christian habit and virtue. Honour be to his memory.”
There is a part of this criticism which is unquestionably just: but there are also several of the views from which I am bound to dissent most strongly, and to which I shall have occasion to revert hereafter. Meanwhile, that the Cardinal paid more attention to these inquiries than Mr. Kip and M. Bunsen suppose, will appear from the testimony of the Abbé Gaume, author of the interesting work, “Les Trois Rome.”
“I had often met the illustrious philologer,” says M. Gaume, “at the Propaganda, where he used to come to spend the afternoon. Kind, affable, modest, he mixed with the students, and spoke by turns Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Chinese, and twenty other languages, with a facility almost prodigious. When I entered, I found him studying Bas-Breton, and I have no doubt that in a short time he will be able to exhibit it to the inhabitants of Vannes themselves. His eminence assured me of two points. The first is the fundamental unity of all languages. This unity is observable especially in the parts of speech, which are the same or nearly so in all languages. The second is the trinity of dialects in the primitive language;—a trinity corresponding with the three races of mankind. The Cardinal has satisfied himself that there are but three races sprung from one common stock, as there are but three languages or principal dialects of one primitive language;—the Japhetic language and race; the Semitic language and race; and the Chamitic language and race. Thus the unity of the human kind and the trinity of races, which are established by all the monuments of history, are found also to be supported by the authority of the most extraordinary philologer that has even been known.
The Cardinal’s testimony is the more important inasmuch as his linguistic acquirements are not confined to a superficial knowledge. Of the many languages which he possesses, there is not one in which he is not familiar with the every day words, common sayings, adages, and all that difficult nomenclature which constitutes the popular part of a language. One day he asked one of our friends to what province of France he belonged. ‘To Burgundy;’ replied my friend. ‘Oh!’ said Mezzofanti, ‘you have two Burgundian dialects; which of them do you speak?’ ‘I know,’ replied our friend, ‘the patois of Lower Burgundy.’ Whereupon the Cardinal began to talk to him in Lower Burgundian, with a fluency which the vine-dressers of Nantes or Beaune might envy.”[535]
This curious familiarity with provincial patois, described by the Abbé Gaume, extended to the other provincial dialects of France. M. Manavit found him not only acquainted with the Tolosan dialect, but even not unread in its local literature. His library contains books in the dialects of Lorraine, Bearne, Franche Comté, and Dauphiné. I have already mentioned his speaking Provençal with Madame de Chaussegros; and Dr. Grant, bishop of Southwark, told me that he was able, solely by the accent of the Abbé Carbry, to determine the precise place of his nativity, Montauban.
Another language regarding which, although it has more than once been alluded to, few testimonies have as yet been brought forward, is Spanish. I shall content myself, nevertheless, with the evidence of a single Spaniard, which, brief as it is, leaves nothing to be desired. “I can assert of his Eminence,” writes Father Diego Burrueco, a Trinitarian of Zamora, who knew the Cardinal during many of these years, “that he spoke our Spanish like a native of Castile. He could converse in the Andalusian dialect with Andalusians; he was able, also, to distinguish the Catalonian dialect from that of Valencia, and both from that of the Island of Majorca.”[536] We have already seen that, at a very early period of his life, he studied the Mexican, Peruvian, and other languages of Spanish America. That he spoke both Mexican and Peruvian after he came to Rome, Cardinal Wiseman has no doubt. He is also stated to have learned something of the languages of Oceanica from Bishop Pompalier, of New Zealand. I may add here, though I have failed in finding native witnesses, that it is the universal belief in Rome that he spoke well both ancient and modern Chaldee, and ancient Coptic, as also the modern dialect of Egypt. He had the repute also of being thoroughly familiar with both branches of the Illyrian family—the Slavonic and the Romanic. To the testimonies already borne to his skill in Armenian and Turkish, I must add that of the Mechitarist, Father Raphael Trenz, Superior of the Armenian College in Paris, who knew him in 1846. “Having conversed with his Eminence,” writes this father,[537] “in ancient and in modern Armenian, and also in Turkish, I am able to attest that he spoke and pronounced them all with the purity and propriety of a native of these countries.”