Although a pension, and as it would seem, not a very illiberal one, was assigned to him, he felt very deeply this exclusion from a career so congenial to his tastes. He continued nevertheless, as before, to instruct pupils privately in these and other languages; and although, as to details, the history of his own studies at this time is a complete blank, yet from his known habits it may reasonably be presumed that when the first feeling of mortification had subsided, the ultimate result of his release from the duties of his chair, was to direct his untiring energies into new fields of research; and it seems to have been during this interval that he first gave his attention to the Sanscrit and other Indian languages;—a family which had till then been but little cultivated except in England, but to whose vast importance, as well as widely extended philological relations, Frederic Schlegel[348] had just awakened the attention of the learned throughout continental Europe.
From the date of this second deprivation, till the year 1812, his quiet and uniform course of life presents hardly a single interesting incident.
In June, 1810, his mother died. But her advanced age and infirm health had long prepared him for this bereavement. She died on the feast of St. Aloysius (June 21,) in her seventy-third year.
The only detail regarding his personal occupations, which I have been able to discover, is derived from a letter, dated November 30th, 1811,[349] to his friend Pezzana, at Parma, which exhibits him again engaged in the drudgery of compiling a catalogue—that of the library of Count Marescalchi. Pezzana had published, some time before, a short bibliographical essay on two very rare editions of Petrarch, which are still preserved in the Parma Collection. Mezzofanti, while engaged in cataloguing the Marescalchi library, discovered a copy of one of these editions, and at once wrote to communicate the fact to Pezzana.
I may also mention, what, in a life so uneventful, must claim to be regarded as an event—a short journey which he made to Modena and Mantua. Joseph Minarelli, the eldest of his sister’s sons, was summoned to Modena in 1813, to ballot in the conscription which followed the terrible campaign of 1812, so fatal to the armies of France. Signora Minarelli was naturally much alarmed at the chance of her son’s being drawn in the conscription, and in consideration for her anxiety, his uncle accompanied him to Modena upon the occasion.
It becomes especially difficult henceforward to follow the history of his studies. The literary friends of this part of his career;—his colleagues in the University; Ranzani; Caturegli, the astronomer; the eminent botanist, Felippo Re; his fellow-pupil and fellow-teacher, Clotilda Tambroni; Schiassi; Magistrini; and others of less note, who could have supplied information, not only as to his habits and pursuits, but as to the actual stages of his progress, are long since dead. The letters of Pietro Giordani,[350] however, recently published, may, in some measure, fill up the blank; not, it is true, as to the details of his biography, but at least in so far as regards the opinion entertained in Bologna of his character and acquirements. Indeed the testimony of Giordani is less open to exception than any which could have emanated from the personal friends of Mezzofanti. Giordani had entered the Benedictine congregation, and had even received the order of sub-deaconship; but on the outbreak of the Revolution, he had renounced the monastic life, cast aside the Benedictine habit, and thrown himself into the arms of the revolutionary party in Italy. Under the French rule at Bologna, he obtained as the reward of his principles, the place of Assistant Librarian, and also that of Deputy Professor of Latin and Italian Eloquence. Hence it will easily be believed that his relations with the Papal party in the University were by no means friendly; and, as he had had with the Abate Mezzofanti himself (as I learn from an interesting letter of M. Libri which shall be inserted hereafter,) some personal misunderstandings, he may be presumed to have been but little disposed to over-rate the qualifications of an antagonist. It is no mean evidence of Mezzofanti’s merit, therefore, that Giordani has specially excepted him from the very disparaging estimate which he expresses regarding the literary men of Italy at this time. “I have held but little intercourse with literary men,” he writes to his friend Lazzaro Papi, “finding them commonly possessed of but little learning and a great deal of passion. Here, however, I have met an exception to the rule—the Abate Mezzofanti—a man not only of the utmost piety, but of attainments truly wonderful and all but beyond belief. You must, of course, have heard of him; but indeed he well deserves a wider fame than he enjoys, for the number of languages which he knows most perfectly, although this is the least part of his learning. Nevertheless, such is his excessive modesty, that he lives here in obscurity, and I must add, to the disgrace of the age, in poverty.”[351]
Nor is Giordani’s report to be regarded as one of those vague panegyrics, which, when Mezzofanti’s fame was established, each new visitor was wont to re-echo. Giordani is not only well-known as one of the purest Italian writers of the century, but enjoyed the highest reputation as a critical scholar; and the subject on which, in another of his letters, he defers to the judgment of Mezzofanti—a delicate question of Greek criticism—was precisely that on which he himself was best qualified to pronounce. In a letter to the Abate Canova (Feb 3, 1812,) he mentions a conjecture that had recently interested him very much; viz., that the great Roman architect, Vitruvius, was a Greek, although he wrote in Latin. His chief argument is based upon Vitruvius’s Latinity, in which he detects traces of foreign idiom. But, lest he should yield too much to fancy, he had appealed to the judgment of some of his colleagues, and he communicates the result to his correspondent. One of the persons thus consulted was Mezzofanti. “I should not rely on my own judgment,” says Giordani, “had I not convinced Cicognara and Mezzofanti that it is right. The authority of the latter is the more important, because my argument rests chiefly on the style, in every line of which I find impressed, even where the subject is not technical, traces of halting [storpiato] and ill-translated Greek; and you know what a judge Mezzofanti is of this point.”[352]
In a letter to another friend, Count Leopoldo Cicognara, (since known as the biographer of Canova)[353] Giordani reports the sequel of this discussion, which confirms in a very remarkable manner, Giordani’s judgment of Mezzofanti’s critical sagacity. Mezzofanti had at first assented to Giordani’s conjecture; but on a closer examination he discovered, that what Giordani had considered the Grecisms of Vitruvius’s style, were, in reality, but translations from various Greek authors, from whom Vitruvius largely borrows, and whom he actually enumerates in the preface of the seventh book. Mezzofanti further pointed out a phrase in the same preface which at once put an end to the discussion, and the discovery of which, as Giordani justly observes, in itself “indicated an inquiring and critical mind.” Vitruvius, in speaking of the Latin writers upon his art, as contradistinguished from the Greek, calls them “antiqui nostri.”[354]