[374] I find the work (Croker’s Edition, London, 1847) in the Catalogue of the “Libreria Mezzofanti,” p. 72.
[375] I may add that, in order to guard against any possible misapprehension of Mr. Harford’s opinion, I called his attention to the doubt which has arisen on the subject. In reply Mr. Harford assured me that he himself heard Mezzofanti speak Welsh at his first visit to Bologna, in 1817.
[376] Letters from the North of Italy, Vol. II., p. 54.
[377] See Life, IV., p. 32. He had not visited Bologna in the interval.
[378] Perhaps it might be inferred from the false spelling of the name—the use of ph for f—(a blunder which violates so fundamental a rule of Italian orthography as to betray a mere tyro in the study) that this passage was penned soon after Byron’s arrival in Italy. But Byron’s orthography was never a standard.
[379] Manavit, p. 106.
[380] Life and Works, IV., 262-3. It may be worth while to note this curious and characteristic passage, as an example of what Byron has been so often charged with—unacknowledged, (and perhaps unconscious) plagiarisms from authors or works which are but little known. The idea of “a universal interpreter at the time of the tower of Babel,” is copied literally from Pope’s metrical version of the second satire of Dr. Donne, to the hero of which the same illustration is applied, in exactly the same way.
“Thus others’ talents having nicely shown,
He came by sure transition to his own;
Till I cried out: ‘You prove yourself so able,