SIR THOMAS URQUHART, KNYCHT
ALL romancical lovers of English literature are grateful to John Willcock for his excellent monograph on Sir Thomas Urquhart, the inimitable translator of Rabelais.
The volume published some twenty years ago makes it possible for us to arrive at a very fair conception of the honest knight whose mellow conceits have been and will ever be so much appreciated by a certain type of reader.
Less learned than Burton, less serious than Sir Thomas Browne, he holds a unique position among men of letters of the seventeenth century.
Not only was he the dandified thaumaturge that looks out upon us from the famous etchings by George Glover, but also, be it said, no mean philosopher. For the most casual observation of his style reveals the fact that he had in his possession some enigmatic secret which enabled him to preserve an intellectual detachment most quaint and crazy, amid the prodigious banalities of the world.
Jerked to and fro, as he undoubtedly was, by destiny, one suspects that in every phase of the hazardous puppet-show the last laugh came from his own aristocratic lips.
Indeed it is as if the familiar chess-board of Kings and Presbyters, of Castles and Knights, over which he moved was but the phantasmagoria of some roguish old-wives' tale.
When he is on his travels it is not the Princes of Italy or the Prelates of Spain that impress his strange humour, but the fact that he met a man in Venice "who believed he was sovereign of the whole Adriatic" and another in Madrid "who thought himself to be Julius Caesar and therefore went constantly into the streets with a laurel crown on his head."
His debts, he confides to us, were enough to "appal the most undaunted spirits and kill a very Paphlogonian partridge that is said to have two hearts." And the Presbyters, whom he so hated, he does not hesitate to dub "cocklimatory wasps" or "evil eggs of evil
