ople learn languages
in the latter sense we have a good example cited by Alfred Russel
Wallace, in the case of a Flemish planter of Ceram, near Amboyna, named
Captain Van der Beck. "When quite a youth he had accompanied a
Government official who was sent to report on the trade and commerce of
the Mediterranean, and had acquired _the colloquial language of every
place they stayed a few weeks at_. He had afterwards made voyages to St.
Petersburg, and to other parts of Europe, including a few weeks in
London; and had then come out to the East, where he had been for some
years trading and speculating in the various islands. He now spoke
Dutch, French, Malay and Javanese, all equally well; English with a very
slight accent, but with perfect fluency, and a most complete knowledge of
idiom, in which I often tried to puzzle him in vain. German and Italian
were also quite familiar to him, and his acquaintance with European
languages included Modern Greek, Turkish, Russian and colloquial Hebrew
and Latin. As a test of his power, I may mention that he had made a
voyage to the out-of-the-way island of Salibaboo, and had stayed there
trading a few weeks. As I was collecting vocabularies, he told me he
thought he could remember some words, and dictated a considerable number.
Some time after I met with a short list of words taken down in those
islands, and in every case they agreed with those he had given me. He
used to sing a Hebrew drinking-song, which he had learned from some Jews
with whom he had once travelled and astonished by joining in their
conversation." {23} Borrow's colloquial gift was, to all appearance,
closely allied to that of this polyglot Fleming.

{23} Wallace, _The Malay Archipelago_, 1890, p. 269.

{25} Flunkeyism he called it, and thence deduced the pecuniary miseries
of Scott's later life. His depreciatory view was in part, too, I
believe, an echo from his favourite _Vidocq_. Speaking of the gipsies in
his chapter on "Les Careurs," Vidocq calls them a species characterised
and depicted with so little truth by the first romance-writer of our
time. But Borrow certainly had a far deeper reason for his dislike of
Scott. Under the specious pretence of deference for antiquity and
respect for primitive models, he imagined that Scott was sapping the
foundations of Protestantism. Newman from the opposite camp saw only the
beneficial effect of Scott's influence in turning men's minds in the
direction of th