“On another occasion he spoke to me with high admiration of the style of Addison, preferring it to that of any English author with whom he was acquainted. He commended its ease, elegance, and grace; and then contrasted it with the grandiloquence of Johnson, whose powerful mind and copious fancy he also greatly admired, though he deemed him much inferior in real wit and taste to Addison. In all this I fully agreed with him; and then inquired whether he had ever read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and, finding he had not, I told him he must allow me to send it to him, as I felt assured, from the interest he displayed in our English literature, it would much amuse and delight him. This promise I subsequently fulfilled.[374]
“Speaking to me about an English lady with whom I was well acquainted, he eagerly inquired, ‘Is she a blue-stocking?’
“He one day talked to me about the Chinese language and its difficulties, and told me that some time back a gentleman who had resided in China visited him. ‘I concluded,’ he added, ‘that I might address him in Chinese, and did so;—but, after exchanging a few sentences with me, he begged that we might pursue our conversation in French. We talked, however, long enough for me to discover that he spoke in the Canton dialect.’
“That one who had never set his foot out of Italy should be thus able in an instant to detect the little peculiarities of dialect in a man who had lived in China, did, I acknowledge, strike me with astonishment.
“This sort of critical sagacity in languages enabled the Cardinal to render important services to the Propaganda College at Rome, in which he held a high office. I was not only struck with the fluency, but with the rapidity with which he spoke the English language, and, I might also add, the idiomatic correctness of his expressions.
“So much of celebrity attached itself to his name that foreigners of distinction gladly sought occasions of making his acquaintance. On being ushered into his presence on one of my visits I found him surrounded by a large party of admirers, including several ladies, who all appeared highly delighted with his animated conversation.”
We shall have other opportunities of adverting to his curiously minute acquaintance, not only with English literature, but even with the provincial dialects of English, by which Mr. Harford was so much struck. But, as some difference of opinion has been expressed with regard to his acquaintance with Welsh, I think it right to note the circumstance that Mr. Harford distinctly remembers him, as early as 1817, to have given “proofs of familiar acquaintance” with that language.[375]
Somewhat later in the same year, November, 1817, Mr. Stewart Rose visited Mezzofanti. The ordeal to which his linguistic powers were submitted in Mr. Rose’s presence was more severe and more varied than that witnessed by Mr. Harford; the former having heard him tried in German, Greek, and Turkish, as well as in English. But as we shall have abundant independent testimony for each of these, Mr. Rose’s testimony is specially important, as recording the exceeding accuracy of Mezzofanti’s English, which he tested by “long and repeated conversations.”
“As this country,” he writes, “has been fertile in every variety of genius, from that which handles the pencil to that which sweeps the skies with the telescope; so even in this, her least favourite beat, she has produced men who, in early life, have embraced such a circle of languages, as one should hardly imagine their ages would have enabled them to obtain. Thus the wonders which are related of one of these, Pico di Mirandola, I always considered fabulous, till I was myself the witness of acquisitions which can scarcely be considered less extraordinary.