that the language of minorities was in nine cases out of ten the direct route to the heart of the secret of folks that puzzled him—­such were the motives that stimulated a hunger for strange vocabularies, not in itself abnormal.  The colloquial faculty which he undoubtedly possessed—­for we are told by Taylor that when barely eighteen he already knew English, Welsh, Irish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, and Portuguese—­rarely goes with philological depth any more than with idiomatic purity.  Borrow learnt some languages to translate, many to speak imperfectly. {22}

But as a comparative philologist, with claims to scientific equipment, his Targum, with its boasted versions from thirty languages or dialects, pales considerably before the almost contemporary Philological Grammar, based upon a comparison of over sixty tongues, by the Dorset poet William Barnes, who, like Borrow himself, was a self-taught man.  To mention but two more English contemporaries of Borrow, there was Thomas Watts, of the British Museum, who could read nearly fifty languages, including Chinese; and Canon Cook, the editor of the Speaker’s Commentary, who claimed acquaintance with fifty-four.  It is commonly said of Cardinal Mezzofanti that he could speak thirty and understand sixty.  It is quite plain from the pages of Lavengro itself that Borrow did not share Gregory XVI.’s high estimate of the Cardinal’s mental qualifications, unrivalled linguist though he was.  That a “word-master” so abnormal is apt to be deficient in logical sense seems to have been Borrow’s deliberate opinion (with a saving clause as to exceptions), and I have often thought that it must have been Shakespeare’s too, for does he not ascribe a command of tongues to the man who is perhaps the most consummate idiot in the whole range of Shakespearean portraiture?

   MARIA.  That quaffing and drinking will undo you:  I heard my lady talk
   of it yesterday, and of a foolish knight that you brought in here to
   be her wooer.

   SIR TOBY BELCH.  Who?  Sir Andrew Ague-cheek?

   MARIA.  Ay, he.

   SIR TOBY.  He’s as tall a man as any in Illyria.

   MARIA.  What’s that to the purpose?

   SIR TOBY.  Why, he has three thousand ducats a year.

   MARIA.  Ay, but he’ll have but a year in all these ducats:  he’s a very
   fool and a prodigal.

   SIR TOBY.  Fie that you’ll say so!  He plays o’ the viol de gamboys,
   and speaks three or four languages word for word, without book.

The extraordinary linguistic gifts of a Mezzofanti were not, it is true, concentrated in Borrow (whose powers in this direction have been magnified), but they were sufficiently prominent in him to have a determining effect upon his mind.  Thus he was distinguished less for broad views than for an extraordinary faculty for detail; when he attempts to generalise we are likelier to get a flood of inconsequent prejudices than a steady flow of reasoned opinions.