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. It is commonly said of Cardinal Mezzofanti that he could speak thirty and understand sixty. It is quite plain from the pages of _Lavengro_ itself that Borrow did not share Gregory XVI.'s high estimate of the Cardinal's mental qualifications, unrivalled linguist though he was. That a "word-master" so abnormal is apt to be deficient in logical sense seems to have been Borrow's deliberate opinion (with a saving clause as to exceptions), and I have often thought that it must have been Shakespeare'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.