language-learning

— Lord Holland, whom I saw this morning, re-echoed my complaint, and said that the likeness of the two languages [Spanish and Italian] was more a hindrance than a help. This comes of language-learning when we are getting old! When I attempted Arabic at Algiers, Johan Pharaoh—a man very unlike his namesake of the Plagues—although it was his interest to retain me as a scholar—first hinted, and then plainly said, that there was ‘a time’ in the cleverest man’s life, when his memory became less impressible to the recollection of languages—in the gentlest manner conveying that I had become an old dunce!