at first appeared, and that Amyot was to some extent justified in his
view of the difficulties it presented. "It is one of those deceitful
tongues," he confesses in a letter to Mr Jowett, "the seeming
simplicity of whose structure induces you to suppose, after applying
to it for a month or two, that little more remains to be learned, but
which, should you continue to study a year, as I have studied this,
show themselves to you in their veritable colours, amazing you with
their copiousness, puzzling with their idioms."{118b} Its
difficulties, however, did not discourage him; for he had a great
admiration for the language which "for majesty and grandeur of sound,
and also for general copiousness is unequalled by any existing
tongue." {118c}

However great his exertions or discouragements, Borrow never forgot
his mother, to whom he was a model son. On 1st/13th February he sent
her a draft for twenty pounds, being the second since his arrival six
months previously. Thus out of his first half-year's salary of a
hundred pounds, he sent to his mother forty pounds (in addition to
the seventeen pounds he had paid into her account before sailing),
and with it a promise that "next quarter I shall try and send you
thirty," lest in the recent storms of which he had heard, some of her
property should have suffered damage and be in need of repair. The
larger remittance, however, he was unable to make on account of the
illness that had necessitated the drinking of a bottle of port wine
each day (by doctor's orders); but he was punctual in remitting the
twenty pounds. The attack which required so drastic a remedy
originated in a chill caught as the ice was breaking up. "I went
mad," he tells his mother, "and when the fever subsided, I was seized
with the 'Horrors,' which never left me day or night for a week."
{119a} During this illness everyone seems to have been extremely