I attribute it more to this than to my inborn linguistic talent, that after more than a quarter of a century I was able to speak correctly and fluently the various Asiatic and European languages. Hungarian, German, Slovak (Slav), Serbian, Turkish, Tartar, Persian, French, Italian, and English were all equally familiar to me, and the greater or lesser perfection of accent and of syntactic forms depended chiefly upon the longer or shorter practice I had had in speaking with natives. I cannot say the same for the writing in these languages. Here the Latin proverb, "_Quot linguas calles, tot homines vales_," did not hold good, for although I could write in several languages, I cannot say that I could write any one language ready for the Press, _i.e._, without any mistakes. In former days I used to write Hungarian a good deal and fairly well. But afterwards I wrote mostly in German and English, and all that I have published since 1864 has been written in one or other of these two languages. In order to obtain more fluency of expression, _i.e._, to feel more at home in a foreign tongue, I used at one time to read for half an hour or more a day in the particular language. Thus I became familiar with the manner of speaking, or rather the peculiarities of expression in that tongue, and when I had thus learned to think fluently in English, German, or Turkish, I also managed to obtain a certain amount of fluency in writing. I fear there can be no question with me of a mother-tongue, and the argument that the language in which one involuntarily thinks is one's real mother-tongue I cannot agree with, were it only for this one reason, that long practice and custom enabled me to think in any language with which I had been familiarised for some length of time. From my earliest youth I had read a good deal of German. I had studied in that language; and afterwards in Hungary of all foreign languages I came most in contact with German, and it seemed to come most easy to me. But afterwards I wrote English quite as easily--that is to say, after I had spent a few weeks in England, and although I never got so far as to be taken for a native, as was the case with Turkish, French, German, and Persian, I had the satisfaction of reading in the criticisms at the time that the absence of the foreign accent in my conversation and my idiomatic style were remarkable.