“Alas!” he one day said to M. Manavit, “that desolating scepticism which had long oppressed his soul, was not natural to such a mind. Sooner or later he would have awakened from it. And then it only remained for him to open the most glorious page in his Childe Harold’s adventurous Pilgrimage—that in which, reviewing all his doubts, his struggles, and his sorrows, and laying bare the deep wounds of his haughty soul, he should have sought rest from them all in the peaceful bosom of the faith of his fathers.”[379] Such a feeling as this on the part of Mezzofanti gives a melancholy interest to the well-known passage, half laughing, half admiring, in which Byron records his recollections of the great linguist. “In general,” he says, “I do not draw well with literary men;—not that I dislike them; but I never knew what to say to them, after I have praised their last publication. There are several exceptions, to be sure; but then they have either been men of the world, such as Scott and Moore, &c., or visionaries out of it, such as Shelley, &c.; but your literary every-day man and I never met well in company;—especially your foreigners, whom I never could abide, except Giordani, &c., &c., &c., (I really can’t name any other.) I don’t remember a man amongst them whom I ever wished to see twice, except perhaps Mezzophanti, who is a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking polyglot, and more;—who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel, as universal interpreter.[380] He is, indeed, a marvel—unassuming also. I tried him in all the tongues in which I knew a single oath or adjuration to the gods, against post-boys, savages, Tartars, boatmen, sailors, pilots, gondoliers, muleteers, camel-drivers, vetturini, post-masters, post-houses, post, everything; and egad! he astounded me—even to my English.” The Abbé Gaume adds, in reference to the last of these languages, an anecdote still current in Rome, though doubtless a mere exaggeration[381] of the real story; viz., that, “when Byron had exhausted his vocabulary of English slang, Mezzofanti quietly asked: ‘And is that all?’ ‘I can go no further.’ replied the noble poet, ‘unless I coin words for the purpose.’ ‘Pardon me, my Lord,’ rejoined Mezzofanti; and proceeded to repeat for him a variety of the refinements of London slang, till then unknown to his visitor’s rich vocabulary!”[382] During the winter of 1817-8, a literary society was formed in Bologna for the cultivation of poetry and the publication of literary and scientific essays, of which Mezzofanti was appointed president.