Castell as a polyglot

Castell
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Edmund Castell, bornatHalley, in Cambridgeshire, in 1606, author of the Hepta-glot Lexicon, which formed the companion or supplement of Walton's Bible, is admitted to have been one of the most profound Orientalists of his day. This Lexicon comprises seven Oriental languages, Hebrew, Chaldee, Samaritan, Syriac, Ethiopia, Arabic, and Persian; and, if we add to those the classical languages, we shall find Castell's attainments to have been little inferior to those of any linguist before his time; even without reckoning whatever modern languages he may be supposed to have known. Castell, nevertheless, is one of the most painful examples of neglected scholarship in all literary history. Disraeli tiuly says that he more than devoted his life to his Lexicon Heptaglotton His own Appeal to Charles the Second, if less noble and dignified than Johnson's celebrated preface to the Dictionary, is yet one of the most touching documents on record. He laments the " seventeen years during which he devoted sixteen or eighteen hours a day to his labour. He declares that he had expended his whole inheritance (above twelve thousand pounds), upon the work; and that he spent his health and eyesight as well as his fortune, upon a thankless task." the copies of his Lexicon remained unsold upon his hands; and. out of the whole five hundred copies which he left at his death, hardly one complete copy escaped destruction by damp and vermin. " the whole load of learned rags sold for seven pounds!" I cannot find that either Castell or his friend (though by no means his equal as a linguist), Brian Walton possessed any remarkable faculty in speaking even the languages with which they were most familiar.