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
period of his death, his most distant excursion from Rome, in which
city he had fixed his residence in 1832, did not exceed a hundred
miles--namely, to Naples, for the purpose of visiting the Chinese
College which is there established.

It is true that at the period of which we speak, Bologna lay upon the
high-road to Rome, and that travellers more frequently rested for a
space upon their journey, than in these days of steam-boat and railway
communication. But, even then, the opportunities of intercourse with
foreign-speaking visitors in Bologna were few and inconsiderable
compared with the prodigious advances which, under all his
disadvantages, Mezzofanti contrived to make. The ordinary European
languages presented but little difficulty; the frequent passings and
repassings of the allied forces during the later years of the war,
afforded him a full opportunity of acquiring Russian; and the
occasional establishment