eare'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.

We can frequently study an author with good effect through the medium of
his literary admirations; we have already noticed a few of Borrow's
predilections in real life. With regard to literature, his predilections
(or more particularly what Zola would call his _haines_) were fully as
protestant and as thorough. His indifference to the literature of his
own time might be termed brutal; his intellectual self-sufficiency was
worthy of a Macaulay or of a Donne. A fellow-denouncer of snobs, he made
Thackeray very uncomfortable by his contemptuous ignorance of _The Snob
Papers_, and even of the name of the periodical in which they were
appearing. Concerning Keats he once asked, "Have they not been trying to
resuscitate him?" When Miss Strickland wanted to send him her Lives, he
broke out: "For God's sake don't, madam; I should not know where to put
them or what to do with them." Scott's _Woodstock_ he picked up more
than once and incontinently threw down as "trashy." As a general rule he
judged a modern author by his prejudices. If these differed by a hair's
breadth from his own he damned the whole of his work. He had to his
credit a vast fund of quaint out-of-the-way reading; not to b