Page:Essays in librarianship and bibliography.djvu/310

 Dr. Shepherd and to William Roscoe, the men who, with James Martineau, have given Liverpool a place in the history of letters. Liberality of opinion united him to both these eminent persons, and his Italian origin and Italian enthusiasm necessarily proved the most potent recommendations to the historian of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo X. From Roscoe, indeed, he received all the affection of a parent, but these were the days of the Liverpool scholar's adversity. Panizzi, nevertheless, probably owed to him the introduction to Lord Brougham which proved the turning-point in his career. He is said to have been of great assistance to Brougham in the Wakefield trial. In 1828, furnished with further introductions from Roscoe to Samuel Rogers and Sir Henry Ellis, he quitted Liverpool to assume, at Brougham's invitation, the post of Professor of Italian in University College, London. He had supported himself while in Liverpool as a teacher of Italian; little record remains of the struggle, but it must have been severe. The present writer has heard him say, while lamenting the miserable salaries paid to supernumerary assistants in the Museum thirty years ago, that he had notwithstanding maintained himself upon much less. One indispensable acquisition he made at Liverpool, a ready command of our language, entirely unacquainted with it as he was upon his arrival in this country. Neither his accent nor his idiom was ever free from traces of his foreign extraction, but when he wrote the latter circumstance was rather favourable to him.