These manuscripts represent years of work.

Borrow has been counted a considerable linguist, and he had assuredly a reading and speaking acquaintance with a great many languages.

But this knowledge was acquired, as all knowledge is, with infinite trouble and patience.

I have before me hundreds of small sheets of paper upon which are written English words and their equivalents in some twenty or thirty languages.
These serve to show that Borrow learnt a language as a small boy in an old-fashioned system of education learns his Latin or French--by writing down simple words--'father,' 'mother,' 'horse,' 'dog,' and so on with the same word in Latin or French in front of them.

Of course Borrow had a superb memory and abundant enthusiasm, and so he was enabled to add one language to another and to make his translations from such books as he could obtain, with varied success.