“The annular eclipse of the sun,” he writes, “was one curiosity for us, and Signor Mezzofanti was another. This extraordinary man is really a rival of Mithridates; he speaks thirty-two languages, living and dead, in the manner I am going to describe. He accosted me in Hungarian, and with a compliment so well turned, and in such excellent Magyar, that I was quite taken by surprise and stupefied. He afterwards spoke to me in German, at first in good Saxon (the _Crusca_ of the Germans,) and then in the Austrian and Swabian dialects, with a correctness of accent that amazed me to the last degree, and made me burst into a fit of laughter at the thought of the contrast between the language and the appearance of this astonishing professor. He spoke English to Captain Smyth, Russian and Polish to Prince Volkonski, not stuttering and stammering, but with the same volubility as if he had been speaking his mother tongue, the dialect of Bologna. I was quite unable to tear myself away from him. At a dinner at the cardinal legate’s, Della Spina, his eminence placed me at table next him; after having chatted with him in several languages, all of which he spoke much better than I did, it came into my head to address to him on a sudden some words of Wallachian. Without hesitation, and without appearing to remark what an out-of-the-way dialect I had branched off to, off went my polyglot in the same language, and so fast, that I was obliged to say to him; ‘Gently, gently, Mr. Abbé; I really can’t follow you; I am at the end of my Latin-Wallachian.’ It was more than forty years since I had spoken the language, or even thought of it, though I knew it very well in my youth, when I served in an Hungarian regiment, and was in garrison at Transylvania. The professor was not only more ready in the language than I, but he informed me on this occasion, that he knew another tongue that I had never been able to get hold of, though I had enjoyed better opportunities of doing so than he, as I formerly had men that spoke it in my regiment. “This was the language of the Zigans, or Gipsies, whom the French so improperly call Bohemians, at which the good and genuine Bohemians, that is to say, the inhabitants of the kingdom of Bohemia, are not a little indignant. But how could an Italian abbé, who had never been out of his native town, find means to learn a language that is neither written nor printed? In the Italian wars an Hungarian regiment was in garrison at Bologna: the language-loving professor discovered a gipsy in it, and made him his teacher; and, with the facility and happy memory that nature has gifted him with, he was soon master of the language, which, it is believed, is nothing but a dialect, and a corrupted one into the bargain, of some tribes of Parias of Hindostan.”[397]