but too many who collect books for the mere collection sake, and with no higher or more practical object than that of placing them upon their shelves. But every one who knew Cardinal Mezzofanti, knows well that it was not so with him. The library which he hoarded his modest means to accumulate, was no idle show-room. It was the bonâ fide workshop in which he pursued his extraordinary vocation; and it may safely be taken as some gauge or measure of his linguistic attainments;-imperfect and inadequate it is true, because some of the languages or dialects with which he was familiar possess no printed literature at all, but, at least as far as it goes, perfectly trustworthy and reliable.

There is no branch of scholarship which has left fewer traces in literature, or has received a more scanty measure of justice from history, than the faculty of language. Viewed in the light of a curious but unpractical pursuit, it is admired for a time, and, perhaps, enjoys an exaggerated popularity; but it passes away like a nine days' wonder, and seldom finds a permanent record. Hence, while the literature of every country abounds with memoirs of distinguished poets, philosophers, and historians, few, even among professed antiquarians, have directed their attention to the history of eminent linguists, whether in ancient or in modern times. We had hoped that the case of Cardinal Mezzofanti, by suggesting the necessity of a comparison with other distinguished linguists, would have furnished to some of his biographers an occasion for the compilation of some such memoir; but it would seem as if the Cardinal's attainments have been considered by them all as completely beyond all idea of competition, and as if, in the eyes of his admirers, his fame had effectually eclipsed that of all his predecessors in the same department of study.

And yet, on the other hand, in order to form a true estimate of the actual extent of Mezzofanti's accomplishment, it is absolutely necessary to compare it with what others had done before him. It is impossible to judge accurately of his proportions, while he stands in the solitary eminence which he has hitherto occupied. In the sketch of his life, therefore, which we propose, we have thought that it might not be uninteresting to prefix to the actual examination of his unquestionably extraordinary acquirements, a brief summary notice of the most eminent linguists of our own and foreign countries. The subject, it is true, is one which demands a far more detailed investigation than is consistent with the limits of a paper like the present. But it is one for which the reader will look in vain to the ordinary repositories of curious information. Neither

in the miscellaneous learning of writers like Bayle and Gibbon, nor in the professional historians of the curiosities of literature, like Feyjoo or Disraeli, nor even in the pages of the philologists themselves, like Adelung, Pallas, or Vater, shall we find any detailed notice of a subject, which, nevertheless, must have deeply interested them all. We are far from professing or expecting to supply the want; but we may at least hope to draw to the subject the attention of others, who enjoy more leisure and opportunity for the investigation.

It would not appear that among the ancients the faculty of language was often cultivated to any remarkable extent. The single prominent instance which is recorded-that of Mithridates, King of Pontus-is so extraordinary as to distance all competition; and neither the great collectors of the curiosities of classic literature,' Aulus Gellius and Athenæus, nor Valerius Maximus, its diligent anecdotist, nor Pliny, whose industry has left no department in nature, letters, or art unexplored, alludes to a single linguist, for whom we would not venture to find a dozen rivals among the couriers or valets-deplace to be met with any morning in the Place Vendôme, or at Leicester Square. The only contrast whom Gellius places in opposition to Mithridates, is the poet Ennius, whose attainments comprised, as we have seen, but three languages, Greek, Latin, and Oscan.* Valerius Maximus, in his celebrated chapter De Studio et Industria,' produces in the department of languages nothing more wonderful than Cato, who studied Greek literature in his old age, Themistocles, who acquired a knowledge of Persian during his exile, in order to recommend himself to Xerxes, and Publius Crassus, who was so familiar with Greek in all its five dialects, that he always gave his decrees as Prætor in the native dialects of the various suitors at his tribunal. † And Pliny speaks of the case of Mithridates in such terms as to make it plain that he considered it not alone unprecedented in degree, but even beyond any parallel at all worthy of being recorded. +

But if the case of Mithridates be a solitary one, the marvellous character of the accomplishment as it existed in him may well make compensation for the rarity of its occurrence. According to Aulus Gellius, he was thoroughly conversant' (percalluit) with the languages of all the nations (twenty-five in number) over which his rule extended. The other writers who relate

* Aul. Gellius, xvii. 17.

† Valer. Maximus, viii. 7.

Hist. Nat. vii. 24., and again xxv. 2.

the circumstance, - Valerius Maximus, Pliny, and Solinus,make the number only twenty-two. Some commentators have regarded the story as a gross exaggeration; and others have sought to diminish its marvellousness by explaining it of different dialects, rather than of distinct languages. But there does not appear in the narrative of these writers any reason for the doubt or for the restriction. Pliny declares that it is quite certain;' and the matter-of-fact tone in which they all relate it, makes it clear that they wished to be understood literally. It was his invariable practice, they tell us, to communicate with all the subjects of his polyglot empire directly and in person, and never through an interpreter;' and Gellius roundly affirms that he was able to converse in each and any one of these tongues ' with as much correctness as if it were his native dialect.'

But whatever judgment we may form as to the credibility or the story of Mithridates, it stands almost alone in classic history. We read of no remarkable linguists, even among the accomplished scholars of the Augustan age; and, perhaps, in the absence of positive and exact information on the subject, it may not unreasonably be conjectured that, among the Christian scholars of the second and third centuries, we might find a wider range of linguistic attainments than among their gentile contemporaries. The critical study of the Bible itself involved a familiarity not only with the Greek and Hebrew, but with more than one cognate oriental dialect beside. St. Jerome, besides the classic languages and his native Illyrian, is known to have been familiar with several of the Eastern tongues; and it is far from improbable that the commentators and expositors of the Bible, such as Origen, Didymus (the celebrated blind teacher of the great Christian school of Alexandria), St. Augustine (who, besides Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Hebrew, may, from his Manichean associations, be presumed to have known other Eastern languages), Theodore of Mopsuestia, and even the more modern St. Ephrem the Syrian, may be taken as amongst the most favourable specimens of the linguists of the classic times.

From the death of Constantine, however, the study would seem to have declined, even among ecclesiastics. The disruption of the empire naturally tended to diminish the intercourse of the East and West, and, by consequence, the interchange of their languages. The knowledge of both Greek and Latin, which in the classic times had been the ordinary accomplishment of every educated man, became rare and imperfect. Pope Gregory the Great, the most eminent Western scholar of his day, spoke Greek very imperfectly; and a still earlier instance is recorded

in which another pope, a man of undoubted ability in other respects, was unable to translate the letters of the Greek Patriarchs, much less to communicate with the Greek ambassadors, except through an interpreter.* The wars of the Crusaders, the establishment of the Christian Kingdom at Jerusalem, and still more the foundation of the Latin empire at Constantinople, had the effect of reviving the intercourse. Many of the knights and palmers who returned from the East, brought with them the knowledge, not only of Greek, but of more than one of the oriental languages beside. The long imprisonments to which, during the holy wars and the Latin campaigns against the Turks, they were often subjected, gave them in some instances a perfect familiarity with Persian, Arabic, Syriac, and Turkish.

It is to one of these imprisonments that we are indebted for the first origin of a long series of publications, which, in more recent times, have rendered very important services to the science of philology. Towards the close of the fourteenth century, a Hungarian soldier, named John Schildberger, who was serving in a campaign against the Turks in Hungary, was made prisoner by the Turks; and, on his return home, after a captivity of thirty-two years, published (in 1428) an account of his adventures. He conceived the idea (which has since become so popular) of illustrating these travels by appending, as a specimen of the languages of the countries in which he had sojourned, the Lord's Prayer in Armenian, and also in the Tartar tongue. The example was imitated by later scholars. William Postel, in 1538, published the Lord's Prayer in five languages; Theodore Bibliander, ten years later, increased the number to fourteen; Conrad Gesner, in 1555, to twenty-two, to which Angelo Rocca, an Augustinian bishop, added three more (one of them Chinese), in 1591; and Jerome Megiser, in 1592, extended the catalogue to forty. John Baptiste Gramaye, a professor of Louvain, made a still more considerable stride in advance. He was taken prisoner by the Algerine corsairs in the beginning of the next century, and collected no less than a hundred different versions of the same prayer, which he published in 1622; but his work seems to have attracted very little notice; for, more than forty years later, a collection made (1668) by Dr. Wilkins (an English divine, mathematician, and philologer of considerable eminence) contains no more than fifty.

When Nestorius wrote to Pope Celestine (A.D. 430) to give an account of the controversy since known under his name, the latter laid his letter aside for a time, 'not being acquainted with the Greek 'language.' See Walch's Historie der Ketzereien, vol. v. p. 701.

In all these works, however, the only object appears to have been to collect as large as possible a number of languages, without any attention to critical arrangement. But, in the latter part of the same century, the collection of Andrew Müller (which comprises eighty-three Pater Nosters) exhibits a considerable advance in this particular. Men began, too, to arrange and classify the various families of languages. Francis Junius published the Lord's Prayer in nineteen different languages of the German family; and Nicholas Witsen devoted himself to the languages of Northern Asia-the great Siberian family,—in eleven of which he published the same prayer in 1692. This improvement, however, was not universal; for although the great collection of John Chamberlayne and David Wilkins, printed at Amsterdam in 1715, contains the Lord's Prayer in a hundred and fifty-two languages, and that of Gesner, the well-known Orientalischer und Occidentalischer Sprachmeister (Leipzig, 1748), in two hundred, they are both compiled upon the old plan, and have little value except as mere specimens of the various languages which they contain.

It is not so with a collection published near the close of the same century, by a learned Spanish Jesuit, Don Lorenzo Hervas y Pandura. It is but one of a vast variety of philological works from the same prolific pen, which appeared, year after year, at Cesena, originally in Italian, though they were all afterwards published in a Spanish translation, in the author's native. country. Father Hervas's collection contains the Lord's Prayer in no less than three hundred and seven languages, besides hymns and other prayers in twenty-two additional dialects, in which the author was not able to find the Pater Noster. But its most important feature consists in the addition of grammatical analyses and notes, by which it is sought to explain and illustrate the structure of the languages themselves. These, as might be expected in a first essay, are often imperfect and unsatisfactory; but they are at least a step in the right direction, and led the way to the more accurate and scientific investigations of the present century.

Almost at the very same time with this important publication of Hervas, a more extensive philological work made its appearance in the extreme north, under the patronage, and indeed the direct inspiration, of the Empress Catherine II. of Russia. The

Saggio prattico delle Lingue: con Prolegomene, e una Raccolta de Orazioni Domenicali in più di 300 Lingue e Dialetti. Cesena, 1787. Linguarum totius Orbis Vocabularia comparativa, Augustissim curâ collecta. Sectionis primæ, Linguas Europæ et Asiæ complectens, Pars prior. 2 vols. 4to. Petropoli 1786-9.