“Well,” said Mezzofanti, “while you wore these spectacles everything was green to your eyes. It is precisely so with me. While I am speaking any language, for instance, Russian, _I put on my Russian spectacles_, and for the time, _they colour everything Russian_. I see all my ideas in that language alone. If I pass to another language, _I have only to change the spectacles, and it is the same for that language also_!” This amusing illustration perfectly describes the phenomenon so far as it fell under observation; but, so far as I am aware, no one has attempted to analyse the mental operation by which these astounding external effects were produced. The faculty, whatever it was, may have been improved and sharpened by exercise; but there is no part of the extraordinary gift of this great linguist so clearly exceptional, and so unprecedented in the history of the faculty of language. A few weeks after the Propaganda academy, I met his Eminence at the levee of the newly created Cardinal Cadolini, ex-Secretary of the Sacred Congregation. Recognizing me at once as “the Maynooth Professor,” he addressed me laughingly in Irish: _Cion̄us tá tú_ “How are you?” It has repeatedly been stated that he knew Irish; and that language is actually enumerated in more than one published list of the languages which he spoke. Had it not been for his own candour on the occasion in question, I myself should have carried away the same impression from our interview. But on my declaring my inability to enter into an Irish conversation, he at once confessed that, had I been able to go farther, I should have found himself at fault; as, although he knew so much as enabled him to initiate a conversation, and to make his way through a book, he had not formally studied the Irish language. Nevertheless that he was acquainted with its general characteristics, and the leading principles of its inflections and grammatical structure, its analogies with Gælic, as well as their leading points of difference, and its general relations with the common Celtic family, I was enabled to ascertain in a subsequent interview, in which I was accompanied by an accomplished Irish scholar, the late Rev. Dr. Murphy of Kinsale. Dr. Murphy was much struck with the accuracy and soundness of his views.