Unhappily his tenure of the Arabic professorship was a very brief duration. The political relations of Bologna had just undergone a complete revolution. Early in 1796, very soon after the advance of the French army into Italy, Bonaparte had been invited by a discontented party in Bologna to take possession of their city, and, in conjunction with Saliceti, had occupied the fortresses on the 19th of January. At first after the French occupation, the Bolognese were flattered by a revival of their old municipal institutions; but before the close of 1796, the name of Bologna was merged in the common designation of the Cisalpine Republic, by which all the French conquests in Northern Italy were described. By the treaty of Tolentino, concluded in February, 1797, the Pope was compelled formally to cede to this new Cisalpine Republic, the three Legations of Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna; and, in the subsequent organization of the new territory, Bologna became the capital of the Dipartimento del Reno.

One of the first steps of the new rulers was to require of all employés an oath of fidelity to the Republic. The demand was enforced with great strictness; and especially in the case of ecclesiastics, who in Italy, as in France, were naturally regarded with still greater suspicion by the Republican authorities, than even those civil servants of the old government who had been most distinguished for their loyalty. Nevertheless the republican authorities themselves consented that an exception should be made in favour of a scholar of such promise as the Abate Mezzofanti. The oath was proposed to him, as to the rest of the professors. He firmly refused to take it. In other cases deprivation had been the immediate consequence of such refusal; but an effort was made to shake the firmness of Mezzofanti, and even to induce him without formally accepting the oath, to signify his compliance by some seeming act of adhesion to the established order of things. An intimation accordingly was conveyed to him, that in his case the oath would be dispensed with, and that he would be allowed to retain his chair, if he would only consent to make known by any overt act whatsoever, (even by a mere interchange of courtesies with some of the officials of the Republic,) his acceptance of its authority as now established.[297] But Mezzofanti was at once too conscientious to compromise what he conceived to be his duty towards his natural sovereign, and too honourable to affect, by such unworthy temporizing, a disposition which he did not, and could not, honestly entertain. He declined even to appear as a visitor in the salons of the new governor. He was accordingly deprived of his professorship in the year 1798.

He was not alone in this generous fidelity. His friend Signora Tambroni displayed equal firmness. It is less generally known that the distinguished experimentalist, Ludovico Galvani,[298] was a martyr in the same cause. Like Mezzofanti, on refusing the oath, he was stripped of all his offices and emoluments. Less fortunate than Mezzofanti, he sunk under the stroke. He was plunged into the deepest distress and debility; and, although his Republican rulers were at length driven by shame to decree his restoration to his chair, the reparation came too late. He died in 1798.

CHAPTER II.
[1798-1802.]

The years which followed this forfeiture of his professorship were a period of much care, as well as of severe personal privation, for the Abate Mezzofanti.

Both his parents were still living;—his father no longer able to maintain himself by his handicraft; his mother for some years afflicted with partial blindness, and in broken or failing health. The family of his sister, Teresa Minarelli, had already become very numerous, and the scanty earnings of her husband’s occupation hardly sufficed for their maintenance, much less for the expenses of their education. In addition, therefore, to his own necessities, Joseph Mezzofanti was now in great measure burdened with this twofold responsibility—a responsibility to which so affectionate a brother, and so dutiful a son could not be indifferent. To meet these demands, he had hitherto relied mainly upon the income arising from his professorship, although this was miserably inadequate, the salaries attached to the professorships in Bologna, at the time when Lalande visited Italy, (1765-6,) not exceeding a hundred Roman crowns, (little more than £25). Small, however, as it was, this salary was Mezzofanti’s main source of income. As a title to ordination, the archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Giovanetti, had conferred upon him two small benefices, the united revenues of which, strange as it may sound in English ears, did not exceed eight pounds sterling;[299] and an excellent ecclesiastic, F. Anthony Magnani, who had long known and appreciated the virtues of the family, and had taken a warm interest in Joseph from his boyhood, settled upon him from his own private resources about the same amount. Now, as Mezzofanti had devoted himself to literature, and lived as a simple priest at Bologna, declining to accept any preferment to which the care of souls was annexed, this wretched pittance constituted his entire income. It is true that he was about this period chaplain of the Collegio Albornoz,[300] an ancient Spanish foundation of the great Cardinal of that name;[301] but his services appear either to have been entirely gratuitous, or the emolument, if any, was little more than nominal.

And thus, when the Abate Mezzofanti, relying upon Providence, had the courage to throw up, for conscience sake, the salary which constituted nearly two-thirds of his entire revenue, he found himself burdened with the responsibilities already described, while his entire certain income was considerably less than twenty pounds sterling! Nevertheless, gloomy and disheartening as was this prospect, far from suffering himself to be cast down by it, he was even courageous enough to venture, about this time, on the further responsibility of receiving his sister and her family into his own house. The renewal of hostilities in Italy, in 1799, filled him with alarm for her security; and his nephew, Cavaliere Minarelli, who has been good enough to communicate to me a short MS. Memoir of the events of this period of his uncle’s life, still remembers the day on which, while the French and Austrian troops were actually engaged before the walls, and the shot and shells had already begun to fall within the city, his uncle came to their house, at considerable personal risk, and insisted that his sister and her children should remove to his own house which was in a less exposed position. From that date (1799) they continued to reside with him.

To meet this increased expenditure, the Abate’s only resource lay in that wearisome and ill-requited drudgery in which the best years of struggling genius are so often frittered away—private instruction. He undertook the humble, but responsible, duties of private tutor, and turned industriously, if not very profitably, to account, the numerous acquisitions of his early years. There are few of the distinguished families of Bologna, some of whose members were not among his pupils—the Marescalchi, Pallavicini, Ercolani, Martinetti, Bentivoglio, Marsigli, Sampieri, Angelelli, Marchetti, and others. To these, as well as to several foreigners, he gave instructions in ancient and modern languages, to some in his own apartments, but more generally in their houses.

As regarded his own personal improvement in learning, these engagements, of course, were, for the most part, a wasteful expenditure of time and opportunities for study; but there was one of them—that with the Marescalchi family[302]—which supplied in the end an occasion for extending and improving his knowledge of languages. The library of the Marescalchi palace is especially rich in that department; and, as the modest and engaging manners of Mezzofanti quickly established him on the footing of a valued friend, rather than of an instructor, in the family, he enjoyed unrestricted use of the opportunities for his own peculiar studies which it afforded. In this family, too, one of the most ancient and distinguished in Bologna, he had frequent opportunities of meeting and conversing with foreigners, each in the language of his own country.