“The well-known Abate Mezzofanti, librarian to the Institute,” she writes, “was of our party. Conversing with this very learned person on the subject of his ‘forty languages,’ he smiled at the exaggeration, and said, that although he had gone over the outline of forty languages, he was not master of them, as he had dropped such as had not books worth reading. His Greek master, being a Spaniard, taught him Spanish. The German, Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian tongues he originally acquired during the occupation of Bologna by the Austrian power; and afterwards he had learned French from the French, and English by reading and by conversing with English travellers. With all this superfluity of languages, he spoke nothing but Bolognese in his own family. With us, he always spoke English, and with scarcely any accent, though I believe he has never been out of Bologna. His tone of phrase and peculiar selection of words were those of the ‘Spectator;’ and it is probable that he was most conversant with the English works of that day. The Abate Mezzofanti was professor of the Greek and Oriental languages under the French: when Buonaparte abolished the Greek professorship, Mezzofanti was pensioned off. He was again made Greek professor by the Austrians, again set aside by the French, and again restored by the Pope.”[389] Like most of Lady Morgan’s sketches, this account of Mezzofanti, although interesting, is not free from inaccuracies. Thus she falls into the common error already noticed, that Mezzofanti up to this time “had never been out of Bologna,” and a still more important mistake as to the cause of his first deprivation of his professorship. He was dispossessed of this professorship, (which, it may be added, was not of Greek but of Arabic,) not because the professorship was suppressed, but because he declined to take the oaths to the new government. The account of his second deprivation is also inaccurate; and the assertion that he never cultivated any languages except those which “had books worth reading,” we shall see hereafter, to be entirely without foundation. The statement too, that “he spoke only Bolognese in his own family” is an exaggeration. With the elder members of the family—his father, his mother, and his sister, Signora Minarelli—it was so; and there was a cousin of his, named Antonia Mezzofanti, a lively and agreeable old dame, and a frequent guest at the house of his sister, to whom he was much attached, and with whom he delighted to converse in the pleasant dialect of Bologna. But the children of his sister were all well educated, and, like the educated classes throughout all the provincial cities of Italy, habitually spoke the common and classical Italian language. Even after Mezzofanti came to Rome, when questioned as to the number of languages that he spoke, he often used jestingly to reply: “fifty, and Bolognese.”[390]