Bolognese clergy as in an especial manner the 'foreigners' confessor'
(_confessario dei forestieri_). In him, visitors from every quarter of
the globe had a sure and ready resource; and in several cases, it was
to the very necessity thus created he was indebted for the
acquisition, or at least the rudimentary knowledge, of a new language.
More than once, it occurred that a foreigner, introduced to the
_confessario dei forestieri_, for the purpose of being confessed,
found it necessary to go through the preliminary process of
_instructing his intended confessor_. For Mezzofanti's marvellous and
almost instinctive power of grasping and systematising the leading
characteristics even of the most original language, the names of a few
prominent ideas in the new idiom sufficed to open a first means of
communication. His prodigious memory retained with iron tenacity every
word or phrase once acquired; his power of methodising, by the very
exercise, became more ready and more perfect with each new advance in
the study; and, above all, a faculty which seemed peculiar to himself,
and which can hardly be described as other than instinctive, of
seizing and comprehending by a single effort the general outlines of
the grammatical structure of a language from a few faint
indications--as a comparative anatomist will build up an entire
skeleton from a single bone--enabled him to overleap all the
difficulties which beset the path of ordinary linguists, and to
attain, almost by intuition, at least so much of the required language
as enabled him to interchange thought with sufficient freedom and
distinctness for the purposes of this religious observance, which is
so important in the eyes of Catholics. And he used to tell, that it
was in this way he acquired more than one of his varied store of
languages. For it will hardly be believed, that this prodigy of the
gift of tongues had never, till his forty-eighth year, travelled
beyond the precincts of his native province; and that, up to the