[417] See Catalogo della Libreria, p. 65.
[418] For an account of these books see Father Vincenzo Sangermano’s Relazione del Regno Barmano, Rome, 1833. Sangermano was a Barnabite Father, and had been for many years a missionary in Ava and Pegu. He states that he himself translated these sacred books. (p. 359.) His orthography of the names is slightly different from Mezzofanti’s.
[419] Idler in Italy, III. p. 321.
[420] Padre Scandellari died in December, 1831. He is spoken of in terms of high praise in the Gazzetta di Bologna for Dec. 27.
[421] Madame de Chaussegros was the widow of the officer by whom Toulon was surrendered to the English, in 1793.
[422] In the hope of arriving at a still more accurate estimate of Mezzofanti’s performance in German conversation, I wrote to request of Dr. Tholuck a note of the “four minor mistakes” to which he alluded. Unfortunately the memorandum which he had made at the time, although he recollects to have observed it quite recently in his papers, has been mislaid, as has also been the Persian distich which Mezzofanti composed during the interview.
[423] At the time of the Restoration, Cornish was still a living language, especially in the West; but, a century later it had quite disappeared, its sole living representative being an old fish-woman, Dolly Pentrath, who was still able to curse and scold in her expressive vernacular. See Adelung, II. 152.
[424] It was in great part from these papers that Cav. Minarelli compiled the list of the several languages cultivated at various times by Cardinal Mezzofanti, to which I shall have occasion to refer soon after.
[425] There is another circumstance of Dr. Tholuck’s narrative which it is not easy to reconcile with the account already cited (p. 239,) from M. Molbech’s Travels;—namely, that “when addressed in Danish he replied in Swedish,” since the former was the only language in which, during an interview of about two hours, Mezzofanti conversed with M. Molbech. In order to remove all uncertainty as to this point, I have had inquiry of M. Molbech in person, through the kind offices of the Rev. Dr. Grüder, a learned German Missionary resident at Copenhagen, who himself knew Cardinal Mezzofanti, and whose testimony to the purity and fluency of his Eminence’s German conversation I may add to the many already known. M. Molbech reiterates and confirms all the statements made by him in his ‘Travels.’ He has even taken the trouble to forward a note in his own hand-writing, referring to the page in the Transactions of the Philological Society, which contains M. Watts’s translation from his book. He adds, that when in 1847, his son waited upon the Cardinal in Rome, for the purpose of presenting him some of M. Molbech’s works, he found his Eminence’s recollection of the interview perfectly fresh and accurate as to all its details.
[426] The reader will scarcely agree with this observation of Dr. Tholuck. The Quichua was one of the languages which, as the Dr. testifies, Mezzofanti only professed to know imperfectly. It must be remembered too, that, during his early years he had many and prolonged opportunities of intercourse with Father Escobar and other South American Jesuit missionaries, who had settled at Bologna, and from whom he may have acquired the language, much more solidly than he could be supposed to learn it from a few casual interviews such as Dr. Tholuck most probably contemplated.