Charles William Russell

“ His celebrity must be an inconvenience to him; for scarcely any educated traveller leaves Bologna without having paid him a visit, and the hired guides never omit to mention his name among the first curiosities of the town. This learned Italian, who has never been so far from his birthplace, Bologna, as to Florence or Rome, is certainly one of the world’s greatest geniuses in point of languages. I do not know the number he understands, but there is scarcely any European dialect, whether Romanic, Scandinavian, or Slavonic, that this miraculous polyglottist does not speak. ”

“ I recollect having often seen him speak to a whole Camerata of the Propaganda students, addressing each in his own language or dialect in rapid succession, and with such ease, fluency, and spirit, and so much of the character and tone of each language that it used to draw a burst of merry laughter from the company; every one delighted to have heard his own language spoken by the amiable Cardinal with its characteristic precision. ”

“ I think a man may be truly said to know a language thoroughly, if he can read it fluently and with ease; if he can write it correctly in prose, or still more, in verse; and above all, if he be admitted by intelligent and educated natives to speak it correctly and idiomatically.
I shall be content to apply this standard to Cardinal Mezzofanti.
Looking back over the narrative of Cardinal Mezzofanti’s life, we can trace a tolerably regular progress in the number of languages ascribed to him through its several stages. ”

“ Eyes beaming courtesy and mild regard— radiant with a sweetness which I have seldom seen equalled; singularly soft and winning, and possessing that undefined power which is the true beauty of an honest eye—a full and earnest, but not scrutinizing look—deep, but tranquil, and placing you entirely at ease with yourself by assuring you of its own perfect calmness and self-possession. But the great charm of Cardinal Mezzofanti’s countenance was the look of purity and innocence which it always wore. ”

“ Be not disturbed by any fear that the pursuit to which I am exhorting you will hinder the profounder study of the sciences. Alas, very different are the thoughts, very different, indeed, the cares which distract the mind of youth and turn its generous fervour aside, miserably disappointing the bright hopes that were formed of it. No: theologians, lawyers, philosophers, physicians, mathematicians, all men of science and learning, have ever found in the Greek literature their most agreeable solace. Many of the sciences had, in Greece, early reached a high degree of perfection ”

“ Mr. George Bidder, one of the latest, and in many respects most creditable, examples of this faculty, confesses his entire deficiency in talent for literature or language; and Zachariah Dase, whose performances as a calculator almost exceeded all belief, could never master a word of any foreign language except a little German.
But in Cardinal Mezzofanti we meet not only each of these qualities, but a most perfect and perfectly balanced union of them all. His memory in itself would have made him an object of wonder. ”

“ The catalogue of Spanish linguists opens with a name hardly less marvellous than that which I have placed at the head of the linguists of modern Italy—that of Fernando di Cordova;—one of those universal geniuses, whom Nature, in the prodigal exercise of her creative powers, occasionally produces, as if to display their extent and versatility. He was born early in the fifteenth century, and was hardly less precocious than his Italian rival, Pico della Mirandola. At ten years of age he had completed his courses of grammar and rhetoric. ”

“ I gladly avail myself of this opportunity to acknowledge the valuable assistance on many points which I have received, in the form both of information and of suggestion, at the hands of this distinguished philologist and traveller. I am but speaking the common feeling of the learned of every country, when I express a hope that, before long, the world may be favoured with the results of his long and laborious researches in the language, literature, and history of Ethiopia. ”

“ Margherita Gaetana Agnesi, of Milan, was familiar with Latin at nine years of age; and, while still extremely young, mastered Greek and Hebrew, together with French, Spanish, and German. In the very meridian of her fame, nevertheless, she renounced the brilliant career which lay open to her, in order to devote herself to God as a Sister of Charity. Another fair Italian, Modesta Pozzo, born at Venice in 1555, deserves to be mentioned, although she is better known for her extraordinary powers of memory, than her skill in languages. ”

“ It is only just, however, [484] to Baron Bunsen, who is pre-eminently the head of the German school of that science, to admit that he carefully draws the distinction between the two branches of the study of language—that of the linguist, and that of the philologer. And although the natural preference which a student unconsciously gives to his own favourite pursuit, no doubt leads him to attach little value to what Mezzofanti knew, and to dwell more on what in his opinion he did not know, yet it must be said that he gives him full credit for his unexampled power as a linguist. ”

“ Most of the branches of knowledge in which he is here represented as deficient, are in themselves the study of an ordinary life. To have added them all to what he really did possess, [485] would have been a marvel far exceeding the greatest wonder that has ever been ascribed to him; nor was any one more ready than the modest Cardinal himself, not merely to admit many particulars in which his learning was defective, but even to disparage the learning which he actually possessed. He confessed over and over again, that he was no philologer—that he was nothing but “an ill bound dictionary.” ”

“ James Crichton was born in 1561, in Scotland. The precise place of his birth is uncertain, but he was the son of Robert Crichton of Eliock, Lord Advocate of James VI. He was educated at St. Andrew’s. The chief theatres of his attainments, however, were France and Italy. There is not an accomplishment which he did not possess in its greatest perfection—from the most abstruse departments of scholarship, philosophy, and divinity, down to the mere physical gifts and graces of the musician, the athlete, the swordsman, and the cavalier. His memory was a prodigy both of quickness and of tenacity. ”

“ There is more truth in the strictures upon Mezzofanti as a writer. In this respect, indeed, he is known very little; for his only published composition, the Panegyric of Father Aponte, and the fugitive poetical exercises in the appendix of this Memoir, can hardly be said to place him in the category of authors. Unhappily, indeed, the spirit of authorship is, with many, a question rather of temperament than of ability. In some it is the very breath of their life—an actual necessity of existence. ”

“ With the former, the knowledge of the words of a language is a very minor consideration in comparison with its inflexions, and still more its laws of transposition (Lautverschiebung) ; Professor Schott of Berlin plainly avows that “a limited knowledge of languages is sufficient for settling the general questions as to their common origin;” [160] and beyond a catalogue of a certain number of words for the purpose of a comparative vocabulary, there is a manifest tendency on the part of many, to regard all further concern about the words of a language as old-fashioned and puerile. ”

“ Every year, from the time of his coming to Rome, even after he had been made Cardinal, he used to assist the students in composing their several national odes for the Polyglot Academy of the Propaganda, which is held during the octave of the Epiphany, and in which the astonished foreigners who witness it behold a living emblem of the unity of the Catholic Church, which alone is able, through the Holy Spirit that vivifieth her, to show forth in one fraternity the union of all tongues, in praising and blessing the Lord who created us and redeemed us by the blood of Jesus Christ. ”

“ People who came several centuries after, and who probably did not know more than one language, and possibly not even that one correctly, have pretended that the twenty-two languages of Mithridates were only different dialects, and that Cyrus only knew the names of his generals. It may be so; we know nothing of the reality, and consequently shall not contradict those critics; but what we do know is, that Signor Mezzofanti speaks very good German, Hungarian, Slavonic, Wallachian, Russian, Polish, French and English. ”

“ The heart—the heart, is the heritage
Which keepeth the old man young!
During a sojourn of some weeks in Rome, in the summer of 1841, I had the honour of conversing with his eminence several times; at the Propaganda; at the Roman Seminary; at a meeting of the Accademia della Religione Cattolica; and more than once in his own apartments. In the course of one of these interviews I heard him speak in several languages, to different acquaintances whom he met, and with each of whom he conversed in his own tongue—English, German, French, Spanish, Romaic, and Hungarian. ”

“ Personally, I have always been disposed to respect and admire every man who possesses an incontestible superiority in any branch of human knowledge; and in this point of view, M. Mezzofanti, whom every body acknowledges to be the man who knew and could speak more languages than any other living man, had certainly a right to boundless admiration on my part. It was popularly reported at Bologna, that M. Mezzofanti, then fifty years old, knew as many languages as he counted years ”

“ His talent is that of a linguist, not that of a philologist. One forenoon in the Vatican, he spoke modern Greek to a young man who came in, Hebrew with a rabbi or ‘scrittore’ of the library, Russian with a magnate who passed through to the manuscript rooms, Latin and German with me, Danish with a young Danish archæologist who was present, English with the English,—Italian with many. German he speaks well, but almost too softly, like a Hamburgher; Latin he does not speak particularly well, and his English is just as middling. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The names with which the catalogue of Italian and that of Spanish linguists open, find a worthy companion in the first name among the linguists of Britain.
With others the study of languages, or of kindred sciences, formed almost the business of life. But it was not so with the wonder of his own and of all succeeding generations—the “Admirable Crichton”; who, notwithstanding the universality of his reputation, became almost equally eminent in each particular study, as any of those who devoted all their powers to that single pursuit. ”

“ To this I will look for a monument, truly durable and immortal, of my dear Father Emanuel, to whom I feel myself bound by eternal gratitude; since gratitude, reverence, and devotion are surely due to them who, by example and by precept, point out to us the road to virtue and to learning, inviting and exhorting us, with loving solicitude, to direct our lives to praiseworthy pursuits and to true happiness. ”

“ In the East indeed, the faculty of language appears, for the most part, in a form quite different from what we shall find among the scholars of the West. The Eastern linguists, with a few exceptions, have been eminent as mere speakers of languages, rather than scholars even in the loosest sense of the word.
[19]
As it is in the East that the office of Dragoman or “interpreter” first rose to the dignity of a profession, so all the most notable Oriental linguists have belonged to that profession. ”

“ His history is so full of interest, that its incidents, almost utterly unvarnished, have supplied the narrative of one of the most popular of modern Russian novels. Born (1711) in a rude fisher’s hut in the wretched village of Denissowka on the shore of the Frozen Ocean, he rose by his own unassisted genius not only to high eminence in science, but to the very first rank in the literature of his native country, of which he may truly be described as the founder; and, although he does not seem to have made languages a special study, he deserves to be noticed even in this department. ”

“ The first really universal linguist of Germany is the great Ethiopic scholar, Job Ludolf, who was born at Erfurt, in 1624. Early in life he devoted himself to the study of languages; and his extensive travels—first as preceptor to the sons of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, and afterwards as tutor to the children of the Swedish ambassador in Paris—coupled with his unexampled industry, [131] enabled him, not only to hold a high rank in history and general literature, but also to attain to a success as a linguist which had rarely been equalled before his time. ”

“ On a careful survey of the rich and varied resources supplied by the foreign ecclesiastical establishments of Rome, and especially by the great treasure-house of the Propaganda, he found that there was one language, and that a language to which he had long and anxiously looked forward—the Chinese—which was, as yet, entirely unrepresented; the native students destined for the mission of China, being at that time exclusively educated in the Chinese College at Naples. ”