“With all his high qualifications,” says the Rev. Ingraham Kip,[517] a clergyman of the American episcopal church, “there is a modesty about Cardinal Mezzofanti which shrinks from anything like praise.” “It would be a cruel misconception of his character,” says Guido Görres, “to imagine that, with all the admiration and all the wonder of which he habitually saw himself the object, he yet prided himself in the least upon this extraordinary gift. ‘Alas!’ he once said to a friend of mine, a good simple priest, who, sharing in the universal curiosity to see this wonderful celebrity, apologized to the Cardinal for his visit by some compliment upon his European reputation:—‘alas! what will all these languages avail me for the kingdom of heaven, since it is by works, not words, that we must win our way thither!’” In truth Cardinal Mezzofanti possessed in an eminent degree the great safeguard of christian humility—a habitual consciousness of what he _was not_, rather than a self-complacent recollection of what he was. He used to speak freely of his acquirement as one of little value, and one especially for which he himself had little merit—a mere physical endowment—a thing of instinct, and almost of routine. God, he said, had gifted him with a good memory and a quick ear. There lay the secret of his success—“What am I,” he would pleasantly say, “but an ill-bound dictionary!” “He used to disparage his gifts to me,” says Cardinal Wiseman; “and he once quoted a saying ascribed to Catherine de Medici, who when told that Scaliger knew twenty languages, observed, ‘that is twenty words for one idea! For my part I would rather have twenty ideas for one word!’” On one occasion, after the publication of Cardinal Wiseman’s _Horæ Syriacæ_, Mezzofanti said to him: “You have put your knowledge of languages to some purpose. When I go, I shall not leave a trace of what I know behind me!” And when his friend suggested that it was not yet too late, he “shook his head and said it was”—which he also repeated to Guido Görres, earnestly expressing his “regret that his youth had fallen upon a time when languages were not studied from that scientific point of view from which they are now regarded.” In a word, the habitual tendency of his mind in reference to himself, and to his own acquirements, was to depreciate them, and to dwell rather upon his own deficiency and short-comings, than upon his success.