Sir Thomas Urquhart, of Cromarty (c. 1605–60), eldest son of Sir Thomas Urquhart, studied at king’s College, Aberdeen, and travelled in France, Spain, and Italy. On his return he took up arms against the Covenanting party in the north, but was worsted and forced to fly to England. Becoming attached to the court, he was knighted in 1641. The same year he published his “Epigrams Divine and Moral.” On succeeding he his father he went abroad. At Cromarty, though much troubled by his creditors, he produced his “Trissotetras; or a most exquisite Table for resolving Triangles,” &c. (1645). In 1649 his library was seized and sold. He again took up arms in the royal cause, and was present at Worcester, where he lost most of his MSS. At London, through Cromwell’s influence, he was allowed considerable liberty, and in 1652 published “The Pedigree” and “The Jewel.” The first was an exact account of the Urquhart family, in which they were traced back to Adam; the second is chiefly a panegyric on the Scots nation. In 1653 he issued his “Introduction to the Universal Language” and the first two books of that English classic, his version of “Rabelais.” The third was not issued till after his death, which is said to have occurred abroad, in a fit of mirth on hearing of the Restoration. His learning was vast, his scholarship defective. Crazy with conceit, he yet evinces a true appreciation of all that is noble, and has many phrases of quaint felicity, many passages of great power. See his “Works” in the Maitland Club series (1834).

Personal

  It is impossible to mistake the small dark profile which he has left us, small and dark though it be, for the profile of any mind except his own…. His ingenious but unfortunate work, “The Universal Language.”… Laborious as this work must have proved, it was only one of a hundred great works completed by Sir Thomas before he had attained his thirty-eight year, and all in a style so exquisitely original, that neither in subject nor manner had he been anticipated in so much as one of them. He had designed, and in part digested, four hundred more. A complete list of these, with such a description of each as I have here attempted of his Universal Language, would be, perhaps, one of the greatest literary curiosities ever exhibited to the world; but so unfortunate was he, as an author, that the very names of the greater number of the works he finished have died with himself, while the names of his projected ones were, probably, never known to any one else…. When we look at his literary character in one of its phases, and see how unconsciously he lays himself open to ridicule, we wonder how a writer of such general ingenuity should be so totally devoid of that sense of the incongruous which constitutes the perception of wit…. And his moral character seems to have been equally anomalous. He would sooner have died in prison than have concealed, by a single falsehood, the respect which he entertained for the exiled Prince, at the very time when he was fabricating a thousand for the honour of his family. Must we not regard him as a kind of intellectual monster—a sort of moral centaur! His character is wonderful, not in any of its single parts, but in its incongruity as a whole. The horse is formed like other animals of the same species, and the man much like other men; but it is truly marvellous to find them united.

  Urquhart translated Rabelais, and, had they had been of the same century, Rabelais would have flouted the hero who gave him a second life. For as in style Urquhart was the last of the Elizabethans, so in science he resumed the fallacies of the Middle Ages. He regarded with a childish reverence the many problems at which Rabelais laughed from the comfortable depths of his easy chair. And there is a delightful irony in the truth that this perfect translator was in his own original essays nothing else than Rabelais stripped of humour. He would discuss the interminable stupidities of the schoolmen with a grave face and ceaseless ingenuity. He had no interest in aught save the unattainable. To square the circle and perfect the Universal Language were the least of his enterprises. And so we touch the tragedy of his life. He was like the man he met at Venice: “who believed he was Sovereign of the whole Adriatic Sea, and sole owner of all the ships that came from the Levant.” His madness—for it was nothing less—inspired him with the confidence that all things were possible to his genius. He was Don Quixote with a yet wilder courage…. Urquhart’s misery is the more acute for the greater height of his aspiration. His life was marred by broken ambitions and made by one surpassing masterpiece. His manifold schemes of progress and of scholarship died with the brain which they inhabited. The Italian artificers and French professors whom he bade to Cromarty never obeyed his invitation; the castle which stood upon the South Suter, was so fiercely demolished that the place of its foundation is left unmarked. The vulgar reputation of Hugh Miller has persuaded the town whereof Urquhart was sheriff to forget that it was the birthplace of a great man. But the translation of Rabelais remains, and that will only die with the death of Pantagruel himself.

General

  We believe, that the expectation of posthumous fame which commonly animates the secret breast of the author, and which the poet sometimes boldly anticipates in his verses, was never more egregiously disappointed than in the case of Sir Thomas Urquhart, of Cromartie, Knight. In the opinion of his contemporaries, he must have been accounted a remarkable man; his works possess a considerable portion of a wild and irregular talent, and, if we may be allowed to gather from his remaining writings the estimation in which he held them and himself, very different, indeed, ought to have been the treatment of posterity…. His translation of “Rabelais” is accounted by the best judges to be the most perfect version of any author whatever—which is no mean praise, when we call to mind the obscurity, singularity, and difficulty of the original, in despite of which he has managed to transfuse the spirit of his author with undiminished force and vigour…. The style of Sir Thomas is of so singular a kind, he possesses such a copious fund of sesquipedalian eloquence, and stalks along his subject with such a rapid and gigantic stride, that we can ensure our readers a certain portion of amusement, at least; and from the curious subject of one of the extracts, perhaps some share of information.

  The epigrams of this redoubtable knight of Cromarty have very little to recommend them: the thoughts are not sufficiently ingenious to support themselves without the aid of more skilful versification; and his fancy and vivacity are more conspicuously displayed in his Jewel, and in his translation of Rabelais.

  It may be suspected that Urquhart, like some others whose naturally fantastic brains were superheated by those troublous times, was not entirely sane. But his learning, or at least his reading, was thoroughly genuine: the “Trissotetras” is not unworthy of a countryman and contemporary of Napier, and the “Logopandecteision” in the midst of its exuberant oddities displays acuteness enough. In language Urquhart is merely an extreme example of the deliberately extravagant quaintness which characterised his time, but it must be admitted that he is one of the most extreme, and that it would be nearly impossible to go beyond him. How far the study of Rabelais, and perhaps of other French writers of the same school encouraged his natural tendencies, and how far these tendencies inclined him to the study of Rabelais, are questions which in the absence of data it is not very profitable to discuss. But he is certainly one of our greatest translators, despite the liberties which he sometimes takes with his text.

  Despite its obvious extravagance, Urquhart’s “Jewel” has not only many graphic and humorous touches, but much truth of observation; while its inimitable quaintness justifies its title in the eyes of lovers of recondite literature…. The same year (1653) saw the appearance of Urquhart’s admirable translation of the first book of Rabelais—“one of the most perfect transfusions of an author from one language into another that ever man accomplished.” In point of style Urquhart was Rabelais incarnate, and in his employment of the verbal resources, whether of science and pseudo-science or slang, he almost surpassed Rabelais himself. As for his mistakes, they are truly “condoned by their magnificence.” He often met the difficulty of finding the exact equivalent of a French word by emptying all the synonyms given by Cotgrave into his version; thus on one occasion a list of thirteen synonyms in Rabelais is expanded by the inventive Urquhart into thirty-six. Some of the chapters are in this way almost doubled in length…. Urquhart was a Scottish euphuist, with a brain at least as fertile and inventive as that of the Marquis of Worcester (many of whose hundred projects he anticipated). His sketch of a universal language exhibits rare ingenuity, learning, and critical acumen. Hugh Miller pointed out that the modern chemical vocabulary, with all its philosophical ingenuity, is constructed on principles exactly similar to those which Urquhart divulged more than a hundred years prior to its invention in the preface to his “Universal Language.” His fantastic and eccentric diction, which accurately reflects his personality, obscures in much of his writing his learning and his alertness of intellect. Urquhart’s singularities of mind and style found, however, their affinity in Rabelais, and conspired to make his translation of the great French classic a universally acknowledged “monument of literary genius.”