The starving meal, and all the thousand aches Which patient merit of the unworthy takes— the exercise of teaching was to him rather an enjoyment than a labour. After his removal to the Vatican Library, and even after his elevation to the Cardinalate, we shall find it his chief, if not his only, relaxation. Few men have possessed in a higher degree the power of winning at once the confidence and the love of a pupil. The perfect simplicity of his character—his exceeding gentleness—the cheerful playfulness of his manner—the total absence of any seeming consciousness of superior attainments—his evident enjoyment of the society of the young, and above all the unaffected goodness and kindness of his disposition, attracted the love of his youthful friends, as much as his marvellous accomplishments challenged their admiration. It is only just to add that he repaid the affection which he thus invariably won from them by the liveliest interest in all that regarded their progress, and a sincere concern for their happiness which followed them in every stage of their after life. By degrees, too, he was beginning, in the natural advance of years, to enjoy the best fruit of the labour of instruction, in the success, and even distinction, attained by his quondam pupils. One of these to whom he was especially attached, the young Marchese Angelelli, had passed through the University with much honour; and, in the beginning of 1815, published anonymously a metrical translation of the Electra of Sophocles, which met with very marked favour. Mezzofanti who was much gratified by the success of this first essay, communicated to his friend Pezzana the secret of the authorship. “I send you,” he writes, May 8, 1815, “a first essay in translation from the Greek, published by an able pupil of mine, whose modesty has not permitted him to put his name to his work. From you, however, I make no secret of it. The author is one of our young nobles, the Marchese Maximilian Francis Angelelli, an indefatigable cultivator of every liberal study. I may add, as there is no danger of its reaching the ears of the modest translator, that this first effort is only the beginning of greater things. You will accept a copy for yourself, and place the other in your library, which I am happy to know grows daily, both in extent and reputation, through the care of its librarian, no less than by his distinguished name.” This first essay of the young poet was followed in the next year by a further publication, containing the Electra, the Antigone, and the Trachiniæ; and, a few years later, his master had the gratification of witnessing the successful completion of his favourite pupil’s task, by the publication of the entire seven tragedies of Sophocles, in 1823-4.[366]