“My next interview with him was after a long lapse of time, for I did not meet him again till the year 1846, the winter of which I passed in Rome. The Abbé was then changed into the Cardinal Mezzofanti. I found him occupying a handsome suite of apartments in a palazzo in the Piazza Santi Apostoli. He assured me he well remembered meeting Mrs. H. and myself at Cardinal Lanti’s, on the occasion above referred to; and in the course of several visits which I paid him during the winter and ensuing spring, his conversation was always animated and agreeable. He conversed with me in English, which he spoke with the utmost fluency and correctness, and only with a slight foreign accent. His familiar knowledge of our provincial dialects quite surprised me. ‘Do you know much of the Yorkshire dialect?’ he said to me: and then, with much humour, gave me various specimens of its peculiarities; ‘and your _Zummersetshire_ dialect,’ he went on to say, laughing as he spoke, and imitating it. “On another occasion he spoke to me with high admiration of the style of Addison, preferring it to that of any English author with whom he was acquainted. He commended its ease, elegance, and grace; and then contrasted it with the grandiloquence of Johnson, whose powerful mind and copious fancy he also greatly admired, though he deemed him much inferior in real wit and taste to Addison. In all this I fully agreed with him; and then inquired whether he had ever read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and, finding he had not, I told him he must allow me to send it to him, as I felt assured, from the interest he displayed in our English literature, it would much amuse and delight him. This promise I subsequently fulfilled.[374] “Speaking to me about an English lady with whom I was well acquainted, he eagerly inquired, ‘_Is she a blue-stocking?_’ “He one day talked to me about the Chinese language and its difficulties, and told me that some time back a gentleman who had resided in China visited him. ‘I concluded,’ he added, ‘that I might address him in Chinese, and did so;—but, after exchanging a few sentences with me, he begged that we might pursue our conversation in French. We talked, however, long enough for me to discover that he spoke in _the Canton dialect_.’ “That one who had never set his foot out of Italy should be thus able in an instant to detect the little peculiarities of dialect in a man who had lived in China, did, I acknowledge, strike me with astonishment.