“M. Mezzofanti came one day to see me at the hotel where I was staying: I happened not to be in my own rooms, but on a visit to another traveller who lodged in the same hotel, Baron Ulmenstein, a colonel in the King of Hanover’s service, who was travelling with his lady. M. Mezzofanti was brought to me; and, as I was the only person who knew him, I introduced him to the company as a professor and librarian of the university. He took part in the conversation, which was carried on in German; and, after this had gone on for a considerable time, the baroness took an opportunity of asking me aside, how it came to pass that a German was a professor and librarian in an Italian university. I replied, that M. Mezzofanti was no German, that he was a very good Italian, of that city of Bologna, and had never been out of it. Judge of the astonishment of all the company, and of the explanations that followed! My readers, I am sure, will not think such a testimony as the Baroness Ulmenstein’s open to any suspicion. She is a thorough German, highly cultivated, and speaks four languages in great perfection.”[398] One result of the doubts thus expressed as to the credibility of Von Zach’s report was to draw out a testimony to Mezzofanti’s familiarity with a language for which he had not before publicly gotten credit, the Czechish or Bohemian. A correspondent of the Baron at Vienna, having read his statement in the _Correspondance_, expressed his satisfaction at the confirmation which it supplied of what he had before regarded as incredible. “I was very glad,” he writes, “to see confirmed by you what the Chevalier d’Odelga, colonel and commandant of Prince Leopold of Naples’ regiment, told me of that marvellous man. Chevalier d’Odelga, who is a Bohemian, conversed in that language with M. Mezzofanti, and assured me that he would have taken him for a countryman had he not known him to be an Italian. I frankly confess that until now, I only half believed the tale, for I regard the Bohemian language as the very rack of an Italian tongue.”[399]