His linguistic mania had less of a philological basis than he would have us believe.
Impatience that Babel should act as a barrier between kindred souls, an insatiable curiosity, prompted by the knowledge 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.