laid up, were so far beyond all example, whether in ancient or modern
times, as not only to place him in the very first rank of the
celebrities of our generation, but to mark him out as one of the most
extraordinary personages recorded in history.

Giuseppe (Joseph) Mezzofanti was born at Bologna in 1774, of an
extremely humble family. His father was a poor carpenter; and the
eminence to which, by his own unassisted exertions, Mezzofanti,
without once leaving his native city, attained in the exercise of the
faculty of language--which is ordinarily cultivated only by the
arduous and expensive process of visiting and travelling in the
different countries in which each separate language is spoken--is not
the least remarkable of the many examples of successful 'pursuit of
knowledge under difficulties,' which literary history supplies. He was
educated in one of the poor schools of his native city, which was
under the care of the fathers of the celebrated Congregation of the
Oratory; and the evidence of more than ordinary talent which he
exhibited, early attracted the notice of one of the members of the
order, to whose kind instruction and patronage Mezzofanti was indebted
for almost all the advantages which he afterwards enjoyed. This good
man--whose name was Respighi, and to whose judicious patronage of
struggling genius science is also indebted for the eminent success of
the distinguished naturalist Ranzani, the son of a Bolognese barber,
and a fellow-pupil of Mezzofanti--procured for his young protégé the
instruction of the best masters he could discover among his friends.
He himself, it is believed, taught him Latin; Greek fell to the share
of Father Emmanuel da Ponte, a Spanish ex-Jesuit--the order had at
this time been suppressed; and the boy received his first initiation
into the great Eastern family of languages from an old Dominican,
Father Ceruti, who, at the instance of his friend Respighi, undertook