{22} Of the marvellous facility with which some people 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 the Middle Ages. (See his article in the British Critic for April 1839, and Apologia, chap. iii.).  As for Wordsworth, Borrow (with characteristic wrong-headedness) conceived him as an impostor.  Had he made Nature his tent and the hard earth his bed with the stars for a canopy?  No; he walked out to sing of moorland, and fell from a “highly eligible” cottage in the Lakes, where women-folk, at his beck and call, bore the brunt of the “plain living.”