radiant with a sweetness which I have seldom seen equalled; singularly soft and winning, and possessing that undefined power which is the true beauty of an honest eye—a full and earnest, but not scrutinizing look—deep, but tranquil, and placing you entirely at ease with yourself by assuring you of its own perfect calmness and self-possession. But the great charm of Cardinal Mezzofanti’s countenance was the look of purity and innocence which it always wore. I have seldom seen a face which retained in old age so much of the simple expression of youth, I had almost said of childhood; although, with all this gaiety and light-heartedness, there was a gentle gravity in his bearing which kept it in perfect harmony with his years and character. He had acquired, or he possessed from nature, the rare and difficult characteristic of cheerful old age, to which Rochefoucault alludes when he says:—_Peu de gens savent être vieux_. And thus he was equally at home among his venerable peers of the Consistory, and in the youngest and most light-hearted _camerata_ of the Propaganda. No old man ever illustrated more clearly that The heart—the heart, is the heritage Which keepeth the old man young! During a sojourn of some weeks in Rome, in the summer of 1841, I had the honour of conversing with his eminence several times; at the Propaganda; at the Roman Seminary; at a meeting of the Accademia della Religione Cattolica; and more than once in his own apartments. In the course of one of these interviews I heard him speak in several languages, to different acquaintances whom he met, and with each of whom he conversed in his own tongue—English, German, French, Spanish, Romaic, and Hungarian. With myself his conversation was always in English. His English, as we have seen, has been variously judged. Herr Fleck describes it as “only middling:” by others it is pronounced to be undistinguishable from that of a native. The truth, as in all such cases, lies between these extremes. All visitors, with the single exception of Herr Fleck, (certainly a very questionable authority,) concur in admitting at least the perfect fluency and strict grammatical accuracy of the Cardinal’s English conversation: but some have hesitated as to its idiomatical propriety. M. Crawford, ex-secretary of the Ionian Islands, told M. d’Abbadie[518] last year, that Mezzofanti appeared to him to use some un-English constructions. To Dean Milman, who was introduced to him several years ago by Mr. Francis Hare, his English appeared “as if learned from books, grammatical, rather than idiomatical.”[519] And Lady Morgan even determines the period of English literature on which his English appeared to be modelled.[520]