Without wearying the reader, however, with further details, I shall transcribe (although it regards a later period,) an interesting letter received from the Rev. Charles Fernando, the missionary apostolic at the Point of Galle in Ceylon, which enters briefly, but yet very fully and distinctly, into the particulars of the languages which Mezzofanti used to speak in the Propaganda, during the writer’s residence there as a student. M. Fernando is a native of Colombo in the Island of Ceylon. He came to Rome early in the year 1843, and remained until after the death of Cardinal Mezzofanti. “When I left Ceylon for Rome,” he writes, August 29, 1855, “I knew but very little of the Cingalese language; a very small vocabulary of domestic words, and a facility in reading in Cingalese characters, without understanding the written language, was the full stock of my knowledge when I reached the college of the Propaganda. From such a master you might be disposed to augur badly of the scholar. Still it was not so. A few days after my arrival in college, I was introduced to his Eminence in his polyglot library and study room in the college itself. Cardinal Mezzofanti knew nothing of the Cingalese before I went to the Propaganda, yet in a few days he was able to assist me to put together a short plain discourse for our academical exhibition of the Epiphany. My own knowledge of the language, nevertheless, was not at that time such as to warrant my saying that he knew the Cingalese, or that he spoke it well. This, however, I can assert confidently, that, after a few conversations with me, (I don’t recollect having been with him above a dozen times for the purpose,) he thoroughly entered into the nature and system of the Cingalese language. Among the other languages of Hindostan, I can only speak as to one. In my time there were no students who spoke the Mahratta, Canarese, or Malayalim; but I heard him speak Hindostani with a student who is now missionary apostolic in Agra, where he was brought up, the Rev. William Keegan.