“Mezzofanti entered, in conversation with two young Moors, and, turning to us, asked us to be seated. On me his first appearance produced an unfavourable impression. His age might be about seventy; he was small in stature, dry, and of a pale unhealthy look. His whole person was in monkey-like restless motion. We conversed together for some time. He speaks Hungarian well enough, and his pronunciation is not bad. I asked him from whom he had learned it; he said from the common soldiers at Milan. He had read the works of Kisfaludi and Csokonai, Pethe’s Natural History, and some other Hungarian books, but it seemed to me that he rather studies the words than the subject of what he reads. Some English being present, he spoke English with them very fluently and well; with me he afterwards spoke French and German, and he even addressed me in Wallachian; but to my shame I was unable to answer. He asked if I knew Slowakian. In showing us some books, he read out from them in Ancient and Modern Greek, Latin and Hebrew. To a priest who was with us, and who had travelled in Palestine, he spoke in Turkish. I asked him how many languages he knew: ‘Not many,’ he replied, ‘for I only speak forty or fifty.’ Amazing incomprehensible faculty! but not one that I should in the least be tempted to envy; for the empty unreflecting word-knowledge, and the innocently exhibited small vanity with which he was filled, reminded me rather of a monkey or a parrot, a talking machine, or a sort of organ wound up for the performance of certain tunes, than of a being endowed with reason. He can, in fact, only be looked upon as one of the curiosities of the Vatican. “At parting, I took an opportunity of asking if he would allow me to present an Hungarian book to the Vatican library. My first care at my hotel was to send a copy of M. W.’s book, ‘Balitéletekröl’ (‘On Prejudices’)[514] to the binder, and a few days afterwards I took it, handsomely bound in white leather, to Mezzofanti, whom I found in a hurry to go and baptize some Jews and Moors. As soon as he saw the book, without once looking into it, even to ascertain the name of the author, he called out, ‘Ah! igen szép, igen szép, munka. Szepen van bekötve. Aranyos, szép, szép, igen szép, igen koszönöm.’ (Ah! very fine, very fine, very finely bound. Beautiful, very fine, very fine, thank you very much;)—and put it away in a book-case. Unhappy Magyar volumes, never looked at out of their own country, but by some curious student of philology like Mezzofanti, and in their own country read by how few!”