A few days, however, after this interview, M. Boutanieff, the Russian minister at Rome, wrote to request that Cardinal Mezzofanti would wait upon the Emperor; and a still more direct invitation was conveyed to him, in the name of the Emperor himself, by his first aide-de-camp. The Cardinal of course could not hesitate to comply. Their conversation was held both in Russian and in Polish. The Emperor was filled with wonder, and confessed that, in either of these languages it would be difficult to discover any trace of foreign peculiarity in the Cardinal’s accent or manner.[540] It is somewhat amusing to add, that the Cardinal is said to have taken some exceptions to the purity, or at least the elegance, of the Emperor’s Polish conversational style. As regards the Polish language, however, the year 1845 supplies other and more direct testimonies than that of the Emperor Nicholas. In an extract cited by Mr. Watts from the Posthumous Works of the eminent Polish authoress, Klementyna z Tanskich Hoffmanowa, who visited Rome in the March of that year, it is stated that “the cardinal spoke Polish well, though with somewhat strained and far-fetched expressions;” and that he was master of the great difficulty of Polish pronunciation—that of the marked _l_—“although he often forgot it.” This lady has preserved in her Diary a Polish couplet, written for her by the Cardinal with his own hand, under a little picture of the Madonna. Ten ogien ktory żyia w sercu twoiem O Matko Boża! zapal w sercu moiem.[541]