“As it would be no small distinction for the collection of Oriental MSS. belonging to this Royal Library of ours, if among them there should be found any deserving of a place amongst the MSS. cited in your dictionary, I shall endeavour, in the hope that it may prove so, to complete my task as speedily as possible, so as to send you at least an index, out of which you may yourself choose the name of any author whom you shall judge deserving of notice. “I believe Dombay’s work has been published. I have the title, ‘_Geschichte der Mauritan. Könige; aus dem Arabischen übersetzt_’;[337] but without date or place. I shall write to Vienna as soon as I can, to order it, if it should be published. I have made a good many interesting acquisitions lately; as for instance, _Albucasis ‘De Chirurgia.’_[338] Oxonii, 1778. ‘_Maured Allatafet Jemaleddini filii Togri Bardii; seu Rerum Aegyptiacarum Annales ab Anno C. 971 ad 1453_’;[339] several ‘_Anthologias_’ and ‘_Chrestomathias_;’ one of which, that of Rink and Vater, has at the end a _Bibliotheca Arabica_ continued up to 1802; and some other books.” * * * * * At this date, Mezzofanti’s correspondence with De Rossi is interrupted; and, although there appears to have been a pretty regular interchange of correspondence between them for some years longer,[340] no further letter has been found among those of De Rossi’s papers which are deposited in the library of Parma, except one written in the year 1812. Scanty as are the details supplied by those which are preserved, they, at least, afford some insight into the process by which the writer’s extraordinary faculty was developed and perfected. However acute and almost instinctive this faculty may have been, it is plain from these letters, that it was at this time most systematically and laboriously cultivated. However much Mezzofanti may have owed to nature, it is certain, that for all the practical results of his great natural gifts he was indebted to his own patient and almost plodding industry; and it may cheer the humble student in the long and painful course through which alone he can aspire to success, to find that even this prodigy of language was forced to tread the same laborious path;—to see the anxious care with which he collected and consulted grammars, dictionaries, manuals, reading books, and other similar commonplace appliances of the study; and to learn, that, with all his unquestioned and unquestionable genius, he did not consider himself above the drudgery at which even less gifted students are but too apt to murmur or repine. It may be added that the toilsome practice of writing out translations from one language into another which these letters disclose, was continued by Mezzofanti through his entire career of study, although in his latter years he pursued it more as an amusement than as a serious task.