It might be instructive to trace the order in which the several languages which he mastered in this earlier part of his career were successively acquired. But unfortunately neither the papers and letters which have been preserved, nor the recollections of the few friends who have survived, have thrown much light upon this interesting inquiry. All accounts, however, agree in representing his life during these years as laborious almost beyond belief. The weary hours occupied in the drudgery of tuition; the time given to the manifold self-imposed occupations described in this chapter; the time spent in the ordinary devotional exercises of a priest, and in the performance of those duties of the ministry in the hospitals and elsewhere which he had undertaken; above all, the time regularly and perseveringly given to his great and all-engrossing study of languages;—may well be thought to form an aggregate of laborious application hardly surpassed in the whole range of literary history. It fully confirms the well-known assurance of the noble Prologue of Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning:” “Let no man doubt that learning will expulse business, but rather it will keep and defend the possession of the mind against idleness and pleasure, which otherwise may enter at unawares to the prejudice of both.” Other students may perhaps have devoted a longer time to continuous application. The celebrated Jesuit theologian, Father Suarez, is said to have spent seventeen hours out of the twenty-four between his studies and his devotions. Castell, the author of the Heptaglot Lexicon, declares, in the feeling address which accompanied its publication, that his thankless and unrequited task had occupied him for sixteen or eighteen hours every day during twenty years.[312] Theophilus Raynaud, during his long life of eighty years, only allowed himself a quarter of an hour daily from his studies for dinner;[313] and the Puritan divine, Prynne, seldom would spare time to dine at all.[314] It may be doubted whether the actual labour of Mezzofanti, broken up and divided over so many almost incompatible occupations, did not equal and perhaps exceed them all in amount, if not in intensity. According to the account of Guido Görres,[315] his time for sleep, during this period of his life, was limited to three hours.[316] His self-denial in all other respects was almost equally wonderful. He was singularly abstemious both in eating and in drinking; and his power of enduring the intense cold which prevails in the winter months throughout the whole of Northern Italy, especially in the vicinity of the Apennines, was a source of wonder even to his own family. During the long nights which he devoted to study he never, even in the coldest weather, permitted himself the indulgence of a fire.
I may here mention that he continued the same practice to the end of his life. Even after his elevation to the cardinalate, he could hardly ever be induced to have recourse to a fire, or even to the little portable brazier, called scaldino, which students in Italy commonly employ, as a resource against the numbness of the feet and hands produced by the dry but piercing cold which characterizes the Italian winter.
CHAPTER III.
[1803-1806.]
From the commencement of 1803, those difficulties of the Abate Mezzofanti’s position, which merely arose from the straitness of his income, began gradually to diminish. On the 29th of January in that year he was appointed assistant librarian of the Istituto of Bologna; one of those munificent literary institutions of which Italy is so justly proud, founded in the end of the seventeenth century by the celebrated General Count Marsigli, and enriched by the munificence of many successive scholars and citizens of Bologna; especially of the great Bolognese Pope, Benedict XIV. Its collections and museums are among the finest in Italy; and the library contains above a hundred and fifty thousand volumes.
But whatever of pecuniary advantage he derived from this appointment, was perhaps more than counterbalanced by the constant demand upon his time from the charge of so extensive a library: especially as he confesses that, up to that period, he had seldom bestowed a thought on the study of bibliography. To add to the ordinary engagements of librarian, too, it was determined, sometime after Mezzofanti’s appointment, to prepare a Catalogue Raisonné, in which the Oriental and Greek department naturally fell to his share. For the Oriental department of the library there seems, up to this time, to have been no catalogue, or at least an exceedingly imperfect and inaccurate one; and as a definite time was fixed for the completion of the task, it became for Mezzofanti a source of serious and protracted embarrassment, to which he alludes more than once in his correspondence.
A more congenial occupation, however, was offered to him soon afterwards. In the end of the same year, he was restored to his former position in the university. On the 4th of November in that year, he was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages;—a place which he was enabled to hold in conjunction with his office in the Library of the Institute.
A few months after his installation, he read at the university, June 23rd, 1804, on the occasion of conferring degrees, the first public dissertation of which I have been able to discover any record. The subject was “The Egyptian Obelisks.” The dissertation itself has been lost; but Count Simone Stratico, of Pavia, to whom we owe the notice of its delivery, speaks of it as “most judicious and learned,” and replete with antiquarian erudition.[317]
The Oriental Professorship in the neighbouring University of Parma, was at this time held by the celebrated John Bernard de Rossi. Mezzofanti had long desired to form the acquaintance of this distinguished Orientalist; and more than once projected a visit to Parma, for the purpose of placing himself in communication with him on the subject of his favourite study. His duties as assistant Librarian at length afforded the desired opportunity. Having occasion to order some of De Rossi’s works from Parma, he addressed to De Rossi himself a letter which soon led to a warm and intimate friendship, and was the commencement of an interesting, although not very frequent, correspondence, which continued, at irregular intervals, up to the time of De Rossi’s death. Some of Mezzofanti’s letters to De Rossi, which are preserved in the Library of Parma, have been kindly placed at my disposal. They are chiefly interesting as throwing some light on the progress of his studies.