Joseph Caspar, Cardinal, son of Francis Mezzofanti and Gesualda dall' Olmo, was born at Bologna, September 17, 1774. His father, who was a carpenter, and who designed him for the same handicraft, placed him, while a mere child, at a dame's school, from which he was soon removed to one of the free schools of the city under the care of the brethren of the Oratory. Father Respighi, a learned and benevolent priest of that congregation, perceiving the extraordinary talents of the boy, prevailed upon his father to place him at a school of a higher class conducted by the Abate Cicotti, and eventually at one of the celebrated "Scuole Pie," from which so many eminent Italian scholars have been produced. Several of the teachers in this school were foreign ex-Jesuits,—Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican, German, and Swedish; and it was from this early opportunity of intercourse with foreigners, and of familiarity with foreign languages, that Mezzofanti's love of linguistic studies received its first impulse. He early evinced a disposition to embrace the ecclesiastical state; and though his father at first opposed this resolution, he consented in the end, and the youth entered the pontifical seminary of Bologna, probably in the year 1786. An illness, however, with which he was seized about his fifteenth year, caused a considerable interruption of his studies, and his theological course was not completed till the year 1797. Of his scholastic and collegiate studies few details, beyond the names of his preceptors, are preserved; and the only notable indication of his future eminence that has been recorded is the prodigious quickness and tenacity of his memory. On one occasion he repeated verbatim a folio page of Chrysostom, after a single reading; and (although little is known of the circumstances under which some of them are acquired) it is ascertained that, before he completed his collegiate studies, he had mastered not only the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages, but also Arabic and Coptic, together with Spanish, French, German, and Swedish.

In September 1795 Mezzofanti was promoted to priest's orders, having just completed his twenty-third year. A few weeks previously he had been appointed professor of Arabic in the university, and he commenced his lectures in the following December. This office, however, he held but a short time. On the annexation of Bologna to the Cisalpine Republic, an oath of adhesion to the new government was tendered to all officials, civil as well as military. Mezzofanti declined to take this oath; and although an offer was made to him to dispense with the oath, provided he would but present himself at one of the semi-public reunions in the Palazzo del Governo, he persisted in his refusal, and was in consequence deprived of his chair. For many years from this time his circumstances were exceedingly straitened, as his parents, now advanced in years, and his only sister and her numerous family, depended almost entirely upon him for support, and his only resource was the precarious income derived from private tuition, chiefly in languages. In the beginning of 1803, however, he was appointed assistant librarian of the Institute of Bologna; and in the November of the same year he was reinstated in his former professorship; or rather was reappointed, with the more comprehensive title, "professor of oriental languages and of Greek;" but, in the manifold political vicissitudes of the period, he was again doomed to a disappointment similar to that which had before befallen him. The professorship of oriental languages was suppressed by a decree of the viceroy of the kingdom of Italy in the year 1808; and Mezzofanti was once more thrown upon the precarious occupation of a private teacher for support until the year 1812, when he was appointed assistant librarian of the university. On the restoration of Pius VII. in 1814, he was again installed in his professorship; and in the following year was named chief librarian of the university,—an office which he continued to hold in conjunction with his professorship as long as he remained in Bologna.

Meanwhile, his progress in languages during these years had been rapid and untiring. His sacred duties as volunteer chaplain in the hospitals, which at this time were constantly crowded with wounded or invalid soldiers of the various armies which the revolutionary war brought together in Northern Italy, placed him in communication with natives of almost every country of Europe,—French, Spaniards, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, Croats, Russians, Swedes, &c. Religious zeal and charity, therefore, no less than the love of learning, became for him a motive of study; and in an incredibly short space of time he was able to master all the leading peculiarities of each new language that presented itself. In 1804 he sent to the celebrated orientalist John Bernard de Rossi of Parma a series of compositions in twelve languages; and as these were most probably learned languages, it may be fairly supposed that this number by no means represented the full extent of his acquirements at that date. He himself relates that his pastime was to turn every opportunity of study to account. The hotel-keepers used to give him notice of the arrival of all strangers at Bologna, and whenever the new arrival promised to bring a new language, or any special opportunity of improvement in an old one, within his reach, he "made no scruple about calling on them, interrogating them, making notes of their communications, asking instruction in the pronunciation of their respective languages." His study of books kept pace with his cultivation of living instructors. He made it a rule to learn every new grammar, and to apply himself to the vocabulary of every strange dictionary, which came in his way. And, as his memory was not only singularly quick, but tenacious almost to a miracle, and as his faculty of analyzing and appropriating the grammatical structure of languages was all but intuitive,—an instinct rather than an intellectual effort,—it will easily be understood that, even with the scanty opportunities of practice which an inland city like Bologna afforded, his power of acquiring foreign languages was quickened or developed in the very exercise.

Accordingly, when the peace of 1815 again opened Italy to travellers, visitors from the various countries of Europe were amazed, as they arrived in Bologna, to find a provincial abate, who had never quitted his native province, speak indiscriminately not only English, French, German, Russian, Polish, and all the leading European languages, but Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Persian, and the other languages of the East. When Mr Stewart Rose visited him, in 1817, he "never once, during long and repeated conversations in English, misapplied the sign of a tense—that fearful stumbling-block to Scotch and Irish." A Smyrnite servant who accompanied Mr Rose "declared that he might have passed for a Greek or Turk in the dominions of the Grand Seignior." With Baron Zach, the celebrated astronomer and editor of the Correspondance Astronomique, in 1820, he spoke in German, "first in good Saxon (the crusa of the German), and afterwards in the Austrian and Sarabian dialects, with a correctness of accent that amazed him to the last degree." In the same interview he spoke to the baron in Hungarian "with a compliment so well turned, and in such excellent Magyar, that he was taken completely by surprise." He spoke Polish and Russian with equal fluency to one of the baron's companions, Prince Volkonski; and at a subsequent meeting he added two much more uncommon languages, Wallachian and Zingari. Captain (now Admiral) Smyth, who was also of the party, still survives to confirm the literal truth of these statements. Lord Byron, Lady Morgan, the Countess of Blessington, and several other English tourists, who followed in the track of Mr Stewart Rose, speak of Mezzofanti in terms equally extraordinary. With M. Molbech, a Danish traveller (still librarian of the Royal Library of Copenhagen), he conversed during a long visit in Danish, which he "spoke with almost entire correctness." With Dr Tholuck, the celebrated orientalist of Halle, he spoke in Arabic and in Persian, "slowly, but with great propriety and exactness;" and he even wrote impromptu for him a Persian distich after the manner of Hafiz, which Dr Tholuck praises for the elegance of its sentiment and the propriety of its language and rhythmical structure.

A reputation so extraordinary procured for him the offer of many eligible appointments in several of the capitals of Europe. He was invited to Paris in 1805, to Naples about 1810, to Rome in 1814, to Vienna in 1815, to Florence on several occasions; but he declined all these flattering and advantageous offers, and remained in comparative poverty at Bologna till 1831, when having been sent to Rome as one of a deputation to the newly-elected Pope Gregory XVI., after the suppression of the Bolognese revolution, he at last yielded to the earnest solicitation of that pontiff, and transferred his residence to the papal capital. He was appointed a domestic prelate of the pope and canon of the church of St Mary Major on his arrival; and in 1833, when Angelo Mai was transferred from the Vatican Library to the post of secretary of the Propaganda, Mezzofanti was installed chief keeper of the Vatican. He was at this time in his sixtieth year, but his energy had not yet undergone the slightest diminution. Soon after he reached Rome he made a journey to Naples, expressly for the purpose of studying Chinese in the Chinese college of that city; and though his health broke down during this visit, he subsequently resumed the study at Rome with such success as not only to compose and speak in this most difficult language, but even to preach to the young Chinese ecclesiastics in the college of the Propaganda! Among the students of this vast missionary establishment, too, he found many new fields of language open to him; and it is ascertained beyond all doubt, that, advanced as was his age when he settled in Rome, he subsequently acquired many additional languages, of which he had known nothing whatever during his residence at Bologna. Of these, besides Chinese already alluded to, may be mentioned several North American Indian languages, Californian, Maltese, Angolese, Amariniña (an Abyssinian). sinian language), and above all, Basque, in both dialects of which (Labourdian and Souletin) he learned to converse when he was nearly seventy years old!

In the year 1838 he was advanced to the cardinalate, conjointly with his friend, the distinguished scholar Angelo Mai. He was appointed head of several ecclesiastical congregations; but never held any office connected with the government. His elevation, however, brought no change in his literary occupations. He continued to pursue his favourite study with the same assiduity; he was still, as before, accessible at all times to strangers who sought his acquaintance; and to the last he never failed to pay a daily visit to the students of the Propaganda, with whom he loved to speak in their respective languages, and to whom he freely acted as instructor in any language which they desired to cultivate.

One of the most remarkable characteristics of his wonderful gift was the power which he possessed of passing suddenly in conversation from one language to another, without the slightest hesitation or the smallest trace of intermixture or confusion. One of his friends compares the completeness of the transition to a man's "passing from one room into another;" so utterly did he leave the first language aside from the moment he began to speak in the second. Another, describing its rapidity, says it was "like a bird flitting from spray to spray." The cardinal himself declared that from the moment he began to speak in a language, he thought, reasoned, saw, in that medium only, as though he possessed no other beside.

Visitors were amazed, "oo," to find him not alone perfectly master of the classical language of their respective countries, but often conversant with the various dialects of each to a degree really marvellous. To a German he would speak in the Swabian or Austrian dialects; to a Hungarian in any of the three dialects of Magyar; to a Spaniard in Castilian, Andalusian, or Catalan. He was familiar with several of the provincial dialects of English, and often amused English visitors by imitations of Yorkshire or Somersetshire provincialisms, or of the cockneyisms of a London cabman. Scotch, too, he was more conversant with than are ninety-nine out of every hundred Englishmen. He was even acquainted with these provincial subdivisions of several languages which are themselves but minor members of the European family; as, for example, the Dutch or Flemish. The secret lay in his prodigious memory. He often declared that he never forgot a word which he had once learned; and his memory was as ready as it was tenacious. His power of composing in these various languages was no less wonderful. He would write, quite impromptu, couplets or quatrains in any required language, according to the nation of his visitor; often, it is true, commonplace in sentiment, and exhibiting but little poetical talent; but displaying, nevertheless, singular command of words and extraordinary mastery of the rhythmical structure of the language, as well as of its principles of metrical versification. Many such little impromptus, in every language of Europe, are in existence. The same power he often exhibited on a larger scale, in the preparation or revision of the metrical pieces in various languages recited at the yearly academies of the Propaganda.

Nor was his knowledge confined to the languages of these various countries. All those who conversed with him attest that his familiarity with their several literatures was very great, and this not merely with the authors of the highest name in each, but with writers comparatively little read, and least of all likely to attract the notice of a foreigner. Of this fact, incredible as it may appear, there is the clearest evidence from travellers of all the principal nations—English, French, Germans, Spaniards, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, Danes, Swedes, Flemings, Dutch, and even Greeks, Armenians, Persians, Turks, and other orientals.

A good deal of uncertainty has existed as to the number of languages known by Mezzofanti, and considerable variety of statement has prevailed on the subject. Much of this uncertainty has arisen from the very vagueness of the inquiry. It is plain that the degrees of his familiarity with different languages must have been very different, and that he possessed a certain amount of acquaintance with many languages which he never pursued to any practical result. The number of languages which he may be said to have known in this way was indeed very great. From a report drawn up by one of his family, and founded on a careful examination of his MSS. and of his books, which are often filled with notes, analyses, paradigms, &c., there is reason to believe that it exceeded a hundred. It is hardly necessary, however, to say that the number which he was able to speak in the manner described in this notice falls far short of this. In the absence of any distinct statement from himself, it is of course impossible to speak with absolute precision; but from a detailed inquiry recently instituted both at Rome and in almost all the other European capitals, and even in the East, there is distinct evidence (marvellous as it may be deemed) of his having spoken (with various degrees of excellence, but yet sufficiently for the purposes of intercourse) between fifty and sixty languages, and of his having known, less perfectly, probably twenty others, in some of which he could converse less fluently, or at least initiate a conversation.

It will easily be supposed that Cardinal Mezzofanti's success as a general scholar must have, in great measure, been sacrificed to this one absorbing pursuit. But he nevertheless enjoyed a respectable reputation. In the sacred learning of his own profession he was well read. He was an earnest though not a very eloquent preacher. That he possessed considerable knowledge of mathematics is attested by an interesting conversation of his with M. Libri, the distinguished historian of mathematical science in Italy; and his visitors, from whatever country they came, generally found him familiar with the history of their respective nations. He was one of the most amiable of men, and his charity, even when his resources were most limited, was active and unceasing. He died at Rome during the absence of the papal court at Gaeta, March 15, 1849. His only published work is a panegyric oration in memory of his first Greek master Father Emmanuel da Ponte, printed at Bologna in 1820.