The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti [pp. 645-661]

8The Life of Cardinal Hlezzofanti.
2. Stated to have been spoken fluently, but hardly sufficiently tested-nine.
3. Spoken rarely, and less perfectly-eleven.
4. Spoken imperfectly; a few sentences and conversational
forms-eight.
5. Studied from books, but not known to have been spoken
-fourteen.
6. Dialects spoken, or their peculiarities understood: thirtynine dialects of ten languages, many of which might justly be
described as different languages.
This list adds up one hundred and eleven, exceeding by all
comparison, (as is shown by the learned introductory memoir
prefixed to the life,) everything known in history. Jonadab
Almanar and Sir William Jones are not claimed to have gone
beyond twenty-eight: Mithridates and Pico of Mirandola have
been made famous by twenty-two.
We have indicated, in passing, some of the methods practised by Mezzofanti in his favourite, it might be said, exclusive
pursuit. It was not, however, only from the conversational
phrases of foreigners, learned and illiterate, in palaces and
hotels, hospitals and confessionals, that he picked up his multifarious vocabulary. He was a painful student of grammars and
lexicons, paradigms and "praxes." He had to drudge it like
the dullest of us. "I made it a rule," he said, "to learn every
new grammar, and to apply myself to every strange dictionary that came within my reach. I was constantly filling my
head with new words."
He seems to have had no order or method in his studies that
would help others in following him. For years he scarcely
allowed himself a reasonable amount of food, sleep, fuel, or
exercise, that he might devote his utmost time and means to
the one object. He attributed part of his success in quickly
catching a new language to physical advantages: "In addition
to an excellent memory, God had blessed me with an incredible
flexibility of the organs of speech." At another time, he said
that the ear and not the eye was for him the ordinary medium
through which language was conveyed. He studied a language
by its rhythm, as containing the principle of its inflexions and
of its changes of letters, according to the organs called into use.
VOL. XXX.-N0. IV. 84
1858.]
657