In a letter to another friend, Count Leopoldo Cicognara, (since known as the biographer of Canova)[353] Giordani reports the sequel of this discussion, which confirms in a very remarkable manner, Giordani’s judgment of Mezzofanti’s critical sagacity. Mezzofanti had at first assented to Giordani’s conjecture; but on a closer examination he discovered, that what Giordani had considered the Grecisms of Vitruvius’s style, were, in reality, but _translations from various Greek authors_, from whom Vitruvius largely borrows, and whom he actually enumerates in the preface of the seventh book. Mezzofanti further pointed out a phrase in the same preface which at once put an end to the discussion, and the discovery of which, as Giordani justly observes, in itself “indicated an inquiring and critical mind.” Vitruvius, in speaking of the Latin writers upon his art, as contradistinguished from the Greek, calls them “antiqui _nostri_.”[354] To the same friend, Count Cicognara, Giordani in a previous letter, dated January 30th, 1812, had written of Mezzofanti’s own peculiar faculty of languages, in terms of almost rapturous admiration. “You know Mezzofanti,” he says;—“Mezzofanti—the rarest, most unheard of, most inconceivable of living men. I call him, and he is, the man of all nations and all ages. By Jove! he appears as though he had been born in the beginning of the world, and, like St. Anthony, had lived in every age and in every country!”[355] In connexion with this very remarkable testimony to the accuracy of Mezzofanti’s knowledge of Greek, I may mention (although it more properly belongs to a later period of his life) an amusing anecdote illustrative of his accomplishments as a Latinist, which is recorded by Dr. Santagata, and the hero of which was M. Bucheron, Professor of Latin Literature in the University of Turin, and one of the most celebrated classical philologists of modern Italy. M. Bucheron came to Bologna, from some cause strongly prepossessed against Mezzofanti, and disposed to regard him in the light of a mere literary charlatan, of showy but superficial acquirements. Of his Latinity—especially in all that bears upon the critical niceties of the language, and the numberless philological questions regarding it which have arisen among modern scholars, M. Bucheron entertained the lowest possible estimate;—considering it, in truth, impossible, that one whose attention had been divided over so many languages as fame ascribed to Mezzofanti, _could be_ solidly grounded in any of them. He resolved, therefore, to put the Abate’s Latinity to a rigorous test; and came to the library prepared with a number of questions, bearing upon the niceties of the Latin language, which he proposed to introduce, as it were casually, in his expected conversation. He was presented to Mezzofanti by his friend, Michele Ferrucci, Librarian of the University of Pisa, from whom, I may add, Dr. Santagata received the account of their interview.