I cannot fully concur, nevertheless, in this opinion. My own impressions of the Cardinal’s English, derived from many conversations on different occasions, agree with those already quoted from Mr. Stewart Rose, Lady Blessington, Mr. Harford, Bishop Baines, Cardinal Wiseman, and others, who attest his perfect accuracy both of grammar and of idiom. Mr. Badeley, the eminent lawyer, who saw him but one year before his death, told me that “he spoke English in a perfectly easy and natural manner;” and Mr. Kip, whose visit was about the same time, declares that, “in the course of a long conversation which he held with the Cardinal, his eminence did not use a single expression or word in any way that was not strictly and idiomatically correct.” It is true that I should hardly have been deceived as to his being a foreigner; but the slight, though to my ear decisive, foreign characteristics of his English, were rather of accent than of language; or, if they regarded language at all, it was not that his expressions were unidiomatical, or that his vocabulary was wanting in propriety, but merely that his sentences were occasionally more formal—more like the periods of a regular oratorical composition than is common in the freedom of every-day conversation. Nor did the peculiarity of accent to which I refer amount to anything like absolute impropriety. His pronunciation was most exact; his accentuation almost unerring; and, although it certainly could be distinguished from that of a born Englishman, the difference lay chiefly in its being more marked, and in its precision being more evidently the result of effort and of rule, than the unstudied and instinctive enunciation of a native speaking his own language. If I were disposed to criticize it very strictly, I might say (paradoxical as this may seem,) that, _compared with the enunciation of a native_, it was almost _too correct to appear completely natural_; and that its very correctness gave to it some slight tendency to that extreme which the Italians themselves, in reference to their own language in the mouth of a stranger, describe as _caricato_. But I have no hesitation in saying, that I never met any foreigner, not resident in England, whose English conversation could be preferred to Mezzofanti’s. The foreign peculiarity was, in my judgment, so slight as to be barely perceptible, and I have myself known more than one instance similar to that already related from Cardinal Wiseman, in which Irish visitors meeting the Cardinal for the first time, without knowing who he was, took him _for an English dignitary_,[521] mistaking the slight trace of foreign peculiarity which I have described for what is called in Ireland, “the English accent.”