he was able to speak Sardinian fluently, and heard the girl’s confession!” * * * * * It might be instructive to trace the order in which the several languages which he mastered in this earlier part of his career were successively acquired. But unfortunately neither the papers and letters which have been preserved, nor the recollections of the few friends who have survived, have thrown much light upon this interesting inquiry. All accounts, however, agree in representing his life during these years as laborious almost beyond belief. The weary hours occupied in the drudgery of tuition; the time given to the manifold self-imposed occupations described in this chapter; the time spent in the ordinary devotional exercises of a priest, and in the performance of those duties of the ministry in the hospitals and elsewhere which he had undertaken; above all, the time regularly and perseveringly given to his great and all-engrossing study of languages;—may well be thought to form an aggregate of laborious application hardly surpassed in the whole range of literary history. It fully confirms the well-known assurance of the noble Prologue of Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning:” “Let no man doubt that learning will expulse business, but rather it will keep and defend the possession of the mind against idleness and pleasure, which otherwise may enter at unawares to the prejudice of both.” Other students may perhaps have devoted a longer time to continuous application. The celebrated Jesuit theologian, Father Suarez, is said to have spent seventeen hours out of the twenty-four between his studies and his devotions. Castell, the author of the Heptaglot Lexicon, declares, in the feeling address which accompanied its publication, that his thankless and unrequited task had occupied him for sixteen or eighteen hours every day during twenty years.[312] Theophilus Raynaud, during his long life of eighty years, only allowed himself a quarter of an hour daily from his studies for dinner;[313] and the Puritan divine, Prynne, seldom would spare time to dine at all.[314] It may be doubted whether the actual labour of Mezzofanti, broken up and divided over so many almost incompatible occupations, did not equal and perhaps exceed them all in amount, if not in intensity. According to the account of Guido Görres,[315] his time for sleep, during this period of his life, was limited to three hours.[316] His self-denial in all other respects was almost equally wonderful. He was singularly abstemious both in eating and in drinking; and his power of enduring the intense cold which prevails in the winter months throughout the whole of Northern Italy, especially in the vicinity of the Apennines, was a source of wonder even to his own family. During the long nights which he devoted to study he never, even in the coldest weather, permitted himself the indulgence of a fire.