[253] His family name seems unknown; his father, who was a facchino, (or porter,) being called simply Il Modenese.
[254] So marvellous was his performance, that it was seriously ascribed to the Devil by Candido Brognolo, in his “Alexicacon,” (Venice 1663), and Padre Cardi thought it not beneath him to publish a formal reply to this charge.
[255] Feller, III. 132.
[256] Ibid, p. 70.
[257] Johnson’s Works, VI. p. 368-74.
[258] The Biographie Universelle places Amaduzzi’s birth (curiously enough for its coincidence with those of the three just mentioned), in 1720: but this is a mistake; he was seventeen years old at the visit of Joseph II. to Rome, in 1767. His birth therefore must be assigned to 1750.
[259] Cancellieri, pp. 84-7.
[260] The learned patristical scholar, John Baptist Cotelier, (Cotelerius,) is another example of precocious development leading to solid fruit. At twelve years of age Cotelier could read and translate fluently any part of the Bible that was opened for him! I may also recall here the case of Dr. Thomas Young, of whom I have already spoken. His early feat of reading the entire Bible twice through before he was four years old, is hardly less wonderful than any of those above recorded. See National Review, vol. II. p. 69.
[261] A vocalist, named H. K. von Freher, has appeared recently, who advertises to sing in thirty-six different languages! He is a native of Hungary. With how many of these languages, however, he professes to be acquainted, and what degree of familiarity he claims with each, I am unable to say; but he is described in the public journals as “speaking English with purity;” and in one of his latest performances he favoured the audience with “portions of songs in no less than three or four and twenty different languages, commencing with a Russian hymn, and proceeding on with a French romance, a Styrian song, a Polish air, which he screeched most amusingly, a Sicilian song, as dismal as the far-famed Vespers of that country, a Canadian ditty, a Hungarian serenade, a Maltese air, a Bavarian, a Neapolitan barcarole, a Hebrew psalm, a Tyrolean air, in which the rapid changes from the basso profondo to the falsetto had a most singular effect.”
[262] The title of this singular volume is worth transcribing: “Coryat’s Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months’ Travels in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia, (commonly called the Grisons’ Country), Helvetia, alias Switzerland, some parts of High Germany, and the Netherlands; newly digested in the hungry air of Odcombe in the county of Somersetshire, and now dispersed to the Nourishment of the travelling Members of this Kingdom.” 4to. London, 1611. It is further noticeable in this place for a polyglot appendix of quizzical verses in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, Welsh, Irish, Macaronic, and Utopian, “by various hands.”