Dr. Tholuck, it will be seen, did not suffer himself to be carried away by the enthusiasm of those who had gone before him. He had eyes for faults as well as for excellencies. Nevertheless, the reader will probably agree with me in thinking the undisguised admiration which pervades his calm and circumstantial statement, even with the drawbacks which it contains, a more solid tribute to the fame of Mezzofanti than the declamatory eulogies of a crowd of uninquiring enthusiasts. There is an irresistible guarantee for his trustworthiness as a reporter upon Mezzofanti’s German, in the fact that he did not fail to take “a note of the four minor mistakes,” into which Mezzofanti fell in the course of their conversation;[422] and one cannot hesitate to receive without suspicion what he tells of his “speaking Arabic and Persian without any hesitation, and quite correctly,” when we find him carefully distinguish between these and the other languages on which he tried him, and note that in these he proceeded “very slowly, composing one word with another for want of practice.” It is proper, however, to add that the opportunity of practice which he afterwards enjoyed at Rome, entirely removed this difficulty: and the fluency and ease with which Mezzofanti there spoke these most difficult languages, is the best confirmation of Dr. Tholuck’s sagacity in ascribing the hesitation which was observable at the time of his visit to want of practice alone. Dr. Tholuck’s letter is specially important, also, as establishing the fact that Mezzofanti’s acquisitions were by no means so easy, or so much the result of a species of instinctive intuition as has been commonly supposed. Many of the circumstances which Dr. Tholuck notes, indicate labour; all point plainly to successive stages of advancement, to various degrees of perfection, in a word, to all the ordinary accompaniments of progress. The little vocabulary and grammatical paradigms of the Cornish language, an extinct and almost forgotten dialect,[423] which even our English philologists have come to disregard, tell of themselves the character of the man. Of course the main attraction of the Cornish dialect for him, was as one of the representatives of the old British family; but it cannot be doubted that he took a pleasure in the systematic pursuit of the structure of a language for the mere sake of the mental exercise which it involved. I am assured by the Cavalier Minarelli that the deceased Cardinal’s books and papers[424] contain many such grammatical and phraseological skeletons, even in languages which might be supposed to have less interest than that in the study of which Dr. Tholuck found him engaged.[425] In reply to further inquiries which I addressed to him, Dr. Tholuck added: