And thus, when the Abate Mezzofanti, relying upon Providence, had the courage to throw up, for conscience sake, the salary which constituted nearly two-thirds of his entire revenue, he found himself burdened with the responsibilities already described, while his entire certain income was considerably less than twenty pounds sterling! Nevertheless, gloomy and disheartening as was this prospect, far from suffering himself to be cast down by it, he was even courageous enough to venture, about this time, on the further responsibility of receiving his sister and her family into his own house. The renewal of hostilities in Italy, in 1799, filled him with alarm for her security; and his nephew, Cavaliere Minarelli, who has been good enough to communicate to me a short MS. Memoir of the events of this period of his uncle’s life, still remembers the day on which, while the French and Austrian troops were actually engaged before the walls, and the shot and shells had already begun to fall within the city, his uncle came to their house, at considerable personal risk, and insisted that his sister and her children should remove to his own house which was in a less exposed position. From that date (1799) they continued to reside with him. To meet this increased expenditure, the Abate’s only resource lay in that wearisome and ill-requited drudgery in which the best years of struggling genius are so often frittered away—private instruction. He undertook the humble, but responsible, duties of private tutor, and turned industriously, if not very profitably, to account, the numerous acquisitions of his early years. There are few of the distinguished families of Bologna, some of whose members were not among his pupils—the Marescalchi, Pallavicini, Ercolani, Martinetti, Bentivoglio, Marsigli, Sampieri, Angelelli, Marchetti, and others. To these, as well as to several foreigners, he gave instructions in ancient and modern languages, to some in his own apartments, but more generally in their houses. As regarded his own personal improvement in learning, these engagements, of course, were, for the most part, a wasteful expenditure of time and opportunities for study; but there was one of them—that with the Marescalchi family[302]—which supplied in the end an occasion for extending and improving his knowledge of languages. The library of the Marescalchi palace is especially rich in that department; and, as the modest and engaging manners of Mezzofanti quickly established him on the footing of a valued friend, rather than of an instructor, in the family, he enjoyed unrestricted use of the opportunities for his own peculiar studies which it afforded. In this family, too, one of the most ancient and distinguished in Bologna, he had frequent opportunities of meeting and conversing with foreigners, each in the language of his own country. * * * * *