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.