HOW PROFESSOR PALMER LEARNT ITALIAN AND FRENCH.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1519, 12 February 1886, Page 4

HOW PROFESSOR PALMER LEARNT ITALIAN AND FRENCH.

The leisure-hours of a young city clerk are generally uninteresting to look back upon, even to him who has enjoyed or wasted them. Those, however, of young Palmer were full of interest and active work. He was restlees ; he could not sit still without occupation ; the routine of office did not satisfy his brain. First, and most important of all, he began to learn Italian, working at the language without assistance, and at first by the old-fashioned methods of grammar, syntax exercises, and so forth. All these appliances he presently threw aside as useless encumbrances. Most of us, when we learn a new language, want to know it just well enough to read it easily; bat Palmer wanted to know it thoroughly, to speak it, think in it, make it a part of himself. In those early days, as afterwards, this was an instinctive desire with him. He became possessed by an overpowering ardour to obtain the mastery of Italian. The method he pursued is instructive. He found out where Italians might be expected to meet, and went ever? evening to sit among them and hear them talkThus, there was in those days a cafe in Titchborne Street frequented by Italian refugees, political exiles and republicans. Here Palmer sat and listened and presently began to talk, and so became an ardent partisan of Italian unity. There was also at that time—l think many of them have now migrated to Hammersmith—a great colony of Italian grinders, and sellers of plaster cast images about Saffron Hill. He went among these worthy people, sat with them in their restaurants, drank their sour wine, talked with them, and acquired their patoii. He found out Italian waiters at restaurants and talked with them. At the docks he went on board Italian ships and talked with the sailors ; and in these ways learned the dialects of Genoa, Naples, Nice, Livomo, Venice, and Messina. One of his friends at this time was a wellknown Signor Buonocorre, the so-called " Fire King, " who used to astonish the multitude n'ghtly at Cremome Gardens and elsewhere by bis feats. For Palmer wss alwsys attracted by people who run shows, "do " things, act, pretend, persuade, deceive, and, in fact, are interesting for any kind of cleverness. However, the first result of this perseverance wss that he made himself a perfect master of Italian, that he knew the country speech as well as the Italian of the schools, and that be could converse with the Piedmontese, the Venetian, the Roman, the Sicilian, or the Calabrian, in their own dialects, as well as with the Surest native of Florence. Also, while e was in the city, he acquired French by a similar process.— Walter Bttant.