Captain (afterwards admiral) Smyth, who accompanied Baron von Zach on this occasion, still survives, after a career of high professional as well as literary and scientific distinction. As a reply to the incredulity to which Von Zach alludes, I may add not only that Admiral Smyth in his “Cycle of Celestial Objects for the Use of Astronomers,” adopts the Baron’s narrative and reprints it at length,[400] but that his present recollections of the interview, which he has been so good as to communicate to me, fully confirm all the Baron’s statements.[401] The admiral adds that, although Mezzofanti made no claim to the character of a practical astronomer, he understood well and was much interested in the phenomena of the eclipse, and especially in its predicted annularity at Bologna. “It was at Mezzofanti’s instance also,” he says, “that Caturegli undertook to compute in advance the elements for an almanac for the use of certain distant convents of the Levant, to aid them in celebrating Easter contemporaneously.”[402] Startling, therefore, as Von Zach’s account appeared at the time of its publication, we can no longer hesitate to receive it literally and in its integrity. In reference to one part of it, that which regards the manner in which Mezzofanti acquired the gipsy language—viz., “that he learned it from a gipsy soldier in one of the Hungarian regiments quartered at Bologna,” it is proper to observe, that he appears also, towards the end of his life, to have studied this dialect from books. The catalogue of his library contains two Gipsy Grammars, one in German, and one in Italian. The peculiar idiom of this strange language in which he himself was initiated, is that which prevails among the gipsies of Bohemia and Hungary, or rather Transylvania, which is the purest of all the European gipsy dialects, and differs considerably from that of the Spanish gipsies. Borrow has given a short comparative vocabulary[403] of both, and has also printed the Pater Noster in the Spanish gipsy form. The notoriety which this and other similar narratives procured for the modest professor, speedily rendered him an object of curiosity to every stranger visiting Bologna; and as there was no want of critics not unwilling to question, or at least to scrutinize, the truth of the marvels recounted by their predecessors, it may easily be believed that his life became in some sort a perpetual ordeal. Thus Blume, the author of the _Iter Italicum_, who visited Bologna some time after Von Zach, does not hesitate to take the Baron to task, and to declare his account very much exaggerated.