————So hab’ ich von Herzen,
Rothstrumpf immer gehasst und violet-strumpf dazu.
It certainly deserves all the ridicule which Mezzofanti heaps on it, and might well make
————the Muses, on their racks,
Scream like the winding of ten thousand jacks.
The allusion to ‘red stocking’ and ‘violet stocking,’ is one of Goethe’s habitual sneers at the Catholic prelacy.
[462] The idea which Mezzofanti throws out here as to the seeming national unconsciousness of the metrical capabilities of the Magyar language is very curiously developed by Mr. Watts, in a paper recently read before the Philological Society. Transactions of Phil. Society, 1855, pp. 285-310.
[463] Steger’s Ergänzungs-Conversations-Lexicon. Vol. IX., pp. 395-7. The work which is intended as a supplement to the existing Encyclopædias, is a repertory of interesting and novel information.
[464] The only Maltese books in the Mezzofanti catalogue are the New Testament; Panzavecchia’s Grammatica della Lingua Maltese, Malta, 1845, and Vassalli’s Lexicon.
[465] Letter dated February 18, 1857.