Part 3

Near the castle there stood a farmhouse, occupied by an old man whose great-grandfather had cultivated the same fields. He was not rich, but much respected by his neighbours for an honest, upright life. His wife was as old as himself. They had been always easy-living people, and had no child but one only daughter. Menie was a delicately pretty girl, a little spoiled, perhaps, in her station, for both father and mother made a queen of her at home. She was never allowed to do any rough work, was always dressed, and her neighbours said, kept in the parlour. Menie had a great many admirers, but her parents thought her too good for everybody, and had a wonderful belief of their own, that she was somehow to get a great match, and be made a lady. There was a strange truth in that notion, as things turned out, for we servants at the castle began to remark how often the young master was seen going and coming about the farmhouse. Maybe the old farmer and his wife encouraged him, for they had a story concerning their own descent from some great chief of the western Highlands, and a family of wild proud cousins, who lived up among the hills; but of this I know nothing more, only that the farmer's daughter was the prettiest girl in the parish. Master Arthur was beginning his nineteenth year, and there was a storm up stairs, such as had never been heard before in the castle, when Lady Catherine found out what was going on, as I think through our minister, who considered it his duty to let her know what every one talked of, but nobody else would dare to mention in her presence. Whether the tempest was more than Master Arthur could stand, or whether Lady Catherine, in her fury--for she had no joke of a tongue and temper--said something of Menie which drove the boy to finish the business in his own way, was long a disputed point in the servants' hall; but next morning he was missed in the castle, and in the course of my duties the same forenoon, I brought a letter from the village post-office, the reading of which sent the young ladies off in hysterics, and made Lady Catherine retire to her room--for it announced that her heir of entail and the farmer's daughter were gone to get married in Glasgow.

The young ladies recovered in about two hours, and her ladyship came out, but only to prepare for a journey to Paris; and quick work she made of it. Within twenty-four hours from the receipt of that letter, she and her daughters were off in the family carriage; the best part of the servants despatched to live at their town-house on board-wages; all the good rooms locked up, and nobody but the gardener, a kitchen-girl, and myself left with the old housekeeper at the castle. The next news we heard was, that the old farmer and his wife had set out to bring home their daughter and son-in-law, saying--poor people, in their pride or folly--that Menie and her husband could live with them till Providence cleared their way to the estate, which nobody could keep from them. I believe it was that speech, coming to her ears by some busy tongue or other, that made Lady Catherine so bitter afterwards; but Master Arthur and his bride came home to the farmhouse, where the parlour and the best bedroom were set apart for their use; and the poor old father and mother were proud to serve and entertain them. They were a young pair; for, as I have said, he was in his nineteenth, and she in her seventeenth year--a handsome pair, too, and more alike than one would have supposed from the difference of their birth. Menie had a genteel, quiet carriage, and really looked like a lady in the church-pew beside our young master, whom we seldom saw but at a distance--for his spirit was too high to come near the castle--and though it wasn't just told us, we all knew that going to the farmhouse would be reckoned the full value of our places.

It was the fall of the year when Lady Catherine left us--all that winter she spent in Paris; and when the spring again came round, we heard of her opening house with even more than usual gaiety in London. That was a great season with her ladyship. In its course, she got her daughters both married to her mind. The one wedded a baronet, and the other a right honourable; but scarcely had the newspapers fully announced his sisters' wedding-breakfasts, and how the happy pairs set out, when Master Arthur was seized with sudden sickness. He had been fishing in a mountain-lake, and got drenched to the skin by the rain of a thunder-storm, overexerted himself in walking home, and caught a pleurisy. The whole parish felt for the poor young man, who had been so hardly used by his mother, and many were the inquiries made for him at the farmhouse. There was wild wo there, for every day he got worse; and within the week, Menie was left a widow. Lady Catherine had gone back to Paris at the close of the season; one of her married daughters was in Italy, and the other in Switzerland; but two cousins of their father were to be found in England; and Master Arthur was laid in the family vault, under our old parish church, before the intelligence reached them. Lady Catherine came back in deep mourning, and alone, but not a whit subdued in spirit: she had been heard to say, that her son was better dead than disgraced; and her estate was at least safe from being shared by peasants. Of her daughter-in-law, she never took the slightest notice. People said, the poor young widow's heart was broken, for she had thought more of Arthur than of his rank and property, and kept well out of the proud, hard woman's way. Her ladyship did not seem to like living at the castle; she stayed only to regulate matters with the factor at Martinmas, and went back again to London. Before she went, a report began to rise, that poor Menie had drooped and pined into a real sickness. They said it was a rapid decline, and a dog would have pitied the father and mother's grief. How strangely they strove to keep that only child, asking the prayers of the congregation, and sending for the best doctors; but all was in vain, for Menie died some days before Christmas. The girl had a simple wish to rest beside Arthur. It was the last words she spoke; and her relations believed that, being his wife, she had a right to a place in the vault without asking anybody's leave. So they laid her quietly beside her husband, no one about the castle caring to interfere, except the factor, who thought it incumbent on him to let her ladyship know.

By way of answer to his letter, down came Lady Catherine herself, one dark, wintry morning; and, without so much as changing her travelling dress, she sent for four labourers, took them with her to the church, and saying her family burying-place was never intended for a peasant's daughter, made them take out Menie's coffin, and leave it at her parents' door. They said that the old pair never got over that sight; and the mother, in her bitterness of heart, declared that Providence had many a way to punish pride, and the woman who had disturbed her dead child, would never be suffered to keep her own grave in peace.

The story made a marvellous stir in our parish, and grand as Lady Catherine was, she did not escape blame from all quarters. There was a great gathering of Highland relatives and Lowland friends to a second funeral, when they laid poor Menie among her humble kindred in the church-yard. It was but a little way from the park gate, and I stood there to see the crowd scatter off in that frosty forenoon. Many a sad and angry look was cast in the direction of the castle; but my attention was particularly drawn to an old man and two boys, who stood gazing on the place. He was close on the threescore-and-ten--they were little more than children; but all three had the same gaunt, yet powerful frames; dark-red hair, which in the old man was but slightly sprinkled with gray; almost swarthy complexions; and a fierce, hard look in the deep-set eyes. By after inquiries, I learned that these were the father of the Highland cousin family, and his two youngest sons. There were three elder brothers, but they were married, and settled on rough sheep-farms; and the old man intended to maintain the ancient honours of his house, by putting his younger boys into some of the learned professions.

The married sisters, now heiresses of entail, never visited the castle again in my time. Lady Catherine came regularly at the terms from London, where she lived constantly; but her stay was no longer than the rent-roll required, and her maid said she rested but badly at night. So years passed on, and I rose in the service. On one of her visits, Lady Catherine thought I would do for a footman, which she happened to want, and sent me to be trained at the house in London. What great and gay doings I saw there needn't be told just now. Lady Catherine kept the best and most fashionable company, and she was never at home an evening that the house was not full. There was money to be made, and plenty of all things; but I did not like it; and having saved a trifle, one of her ladyship's sons-in-law--he was the best of the two--got me the place at the toll-bar.

You remember me there, Master Willie, and what great times we had on Saturday afternoons. You may recollect, too, how many foot-passengers used to come and go. It was my amusement to watch them when I had nothing better to do; but of all who passed my window, there were none took my attention so completely as two young men, who always walked arm-in-arm, and seemed to be brothers. I thought I had seen their strongly-marked Highland faces before, and by degrees learned that they were none other than the old man's two sons, who had been at poor Menie's last funeral, but were now grown up, and studying for the medical profession at the college in Glasgow. Their father evidently kept them on short allowance, judging from their coarse tartan clothes, and continual munching of oaten cakes: but I was told they were hard students, and particularly clever in the anatomy class. One dark, dreary morning, about the Christmas-time, I noted that Lady Catherine and her family had been in my dreams all night--their grand house, and gay goings-on in London, mingling strangely with the old story of Master Arthur and the farmer's daughter. When the newspaper, which I shared with the schoolmaster, came, judge of my astonishment to read that her ladyship had died suddenly in a fit of apoplexy, which came upon her at the whist-table, and her remains had been conveyed to the family vault in Dumbartonshire. There was a lesson on the uncertainty of life! and it is my trust that I found in it a use of warning; but the continual news and strangers at the toll-bar, the exact gathering in of the dues, which was not always an easy task, and your own merry schoolmates, Master Willie, had in a manner shuffled it out of my mind before the second evening.

It had been a dark, foggy day, and I went early to sleep, there being few travellers; but in the dead of night, between twelve and one, I was roused by a thundering summons at the toll-bar. The night was calm and starless, a mass of heavy clouds covered the sky, broken at times by gusts of moaning wind from the west, and broad bursts of moonlight. I threw on my coat, lit my lantern, and hurried out. There stood a large gig with three persons. They must have been tightly packed in it, and I never saw a more impatient horse. There was some delay in getting out the silver, and I had time to see that the two men who sat, one on each side, were the Highland brothers. There was a woman between them, in a dingy cloak and bonnet, with a thick black veil. She neither moved nor spoke, though the toll somehow puzzled the students. I was determined to have it any way, and one of them saying something to his companion in Gaelic, reached a half-crown to me. I knew I had no change, and told him so. 'I'll call in the morning,' said he; but the horse gave a bound, and the silver flew out of his fingers. Both the brothers looked down after it. I had a strange curiosity about their companion, and that instant a gust of wind blew back the veil, and the moonlight shone clear and full upon the face: it was the dead visage of Lady Catherine! I saw but one glance of it; the next moment the heavy veil had fallen. 'Get the silver yourself, and keep it all,' cried the two men, as I opened for them without a word: and from that day to this, no one has ever heard the story from me. I put the half-crown in the poor's-box next Sabbath. But, Master Willie, after that night I never cared for keeping the toll-bar. The sound of wheels coming after dark had always a strange effect on me, and I could never see a gig pass without shivering. So I gave up my situation, and took to the old trade of gardening again. The pleasant plants and flowers bring no dark stories to one's mind. But yonder's the laird: dinner will be ready by this time.

* * * * *

And John was right; for it was ready, with a jovial party to despatch it. But I never saw my old friend after. He emigrated to Canada with his managing master in the following spring; and, having at least kept the real names with enjoined secrecy, it seems at this distance of time no breach of trust to repeat the toll-keeper's story.

CARDINAL MEZZOFANTI.

Among the lions of Rome during the last twenty years, not the least attractive, especially for literary visitors, was the celebrated Cardinal Mezzofanti. Easy of access to foreigners of every condition, simple, unpretending, cheerful, courteous even to familiarity, he never failed to make a most favourable impression upon his visitors; and marvellous as were the tales in circulation concerning him, the opportunity of witnessing more closely the exercise of his almost preternatural powers of language, served but to deepen the wonder with which he was regarded. The extent, the variety, and the solidity of his attainments, and, still more, his complete and ready command, for the purposes of conversation, of all the motley stores which he had 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 to teach him Hebrew. Beyond this point, Mezzofanti's knowledge of languages was almost exclusively the result of his own unassisted study.

From a very early age, he was destined for the church, and he received holy orders about the year 1797. During the period of his probationary studies, however, he obtained, through the kindness of his friend F. Respighi, the place of tutor in the family of the Marescalchi, one of the most distinguished among the nobility of Bologna; and the opportunities for his peculiar studies afforded by the curious and valuable library to which he thus enjoyed free access, may probably have exercised a decisive influence upon his whole career.

His attainments gradually attracted the notice of his fellow-citizens. In the year 1797, he was appointed professor of Arabic in the university; a few years later, he was named assistant-librarian of the city library; and in 1803, he succeeded to the important chair of Oriental Languages. This post, which was most congenial to his tastes, he held, with one interruption, for a long series of years. In 1812, he was advanced to a higher place in the staff of the library; and in 1815, on the death of the chief librarian, Pozetti, he was appointed to fill his place. When it is considered how peculiarly engrossing the study of languages is known to be, and especially how attractive for an enthusiastic scholar like Mezzofanti, it might be supposed that for him the office of librarian could have been little more than a nominal one. But the library of Bologna to the present day bears abundant evidence that it was far otherwise. The admirable order in which the Greek and Oriental manuscripts are arranged, the excellent _catalogue raisonné_ of these manuscripts, and the valuable additions to the notices of them by Assemani and Talmar which it contains, are all the fruit of Mezzofanti's labour as librarian.

During his occupancy of this office, too, he continued to hold his professorship of Oriental languages, and, for a considerable part of the time, that of Greek literature in addition. Nor was he exempt from those domestic cares and anxieties which are often the most painful drawback upon literary activity. The death of a brother, which threw upon him the care of an unprovided family of eleven children, was the severest trial sustained in Mezzofanti's otherwise comparatively quiet career; and by driving him to the ordinary expedient of distressed scholars--that of giving private lectures--it tended more than all his public occupations to trench upon his time, and to abridge his opportunities of application to his favourite study.

Perhaps, indeed, of all who have ever attained to the same eminence in any department which Mezzofanti reached in that of languages, there hardly ever was one who had so little of the mere student in his character. In the midst of these varied and distracting occupations, he was at all times most assiduous in his attendance upon the sick in the public hospitals, of which he acted as the chaplain. There was another also of his priestly duties, for the zealous discharge of which he was scarcely less distinguished, and which became subsidiary, in a very remarkable way, to his progress in the knowledge of languages. In the absence, up to the present time, of any regular memoir of him, it is impossible to fix with precision the history of his progress in the acquisition of the several languages. But it is well known, that at a very early period he was master of all the leading European languages, and of those Oriental tongues which are comprised in the Semitic family. Very early, therefore, in Mezzofanti's career, he was marked out among the entire body of the 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 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 of Austrian troops in Bologna, brought him into contact with the motley tongues of that vast empire--the Magyar, the Czechish, the Servian, the Walachian, and the Romani; but beyond this, even his spirit of enterprise had no vent in his native city; and all his further conquests were exclusively the result due to his own private and unassisted study.