his enemies to spare his life, he traces up his genealogy, step by step, to Adam, in order to convince them that the last remaining branch of so ancient a stem ought not to be prematurely cut off; to procure his liberation, he proposed to discover and make public an universal language invented by himself, which, amongst its many other advantages, would save to scholars two years out of five; a saving, (says the author) which cannot be appreciated at less than ten thousand pounds English a-year." But all his management was in vain.-A length of genealogy was but a poor protection against the indignation of the parliament; the usurper and his saints were busied in other studies than the learning old languages, or the formation of new ones; and Sir Thomas, notwithstanding his pedigree and universal language, would, in all probability, have continued in prison till the end of the usurpation, had he not been fortunate enough to make his escape to the continent, where he continued till his death.

The account of the plunder of his manuscripts, in the preface to his book, is so whimsical and entertaining, I cannot resist the temptation of transcribing it.

"No sooner had the total rout of the regal party at Worcester given way to the taking of that city, and surrendering up of all the prisoners to the custody of the marshal-general and his deputies; but the liberty customary at such occasions, to be connived at in favour of a victorious army, emboldened some of the new levied forces of the adjacent counties, to confirm their conquest by the spoil of the captives. For the better achieve ment of which design, not reckoning those great many others that in all the other corners of the town were ferreting every room for plunder, a string or two of exquisite snaps and clean shavers (if ever there were any) rushing into Mr Spilsbury's house, (who is a very honest man, and hath an exceeding good woman to his wife, broke into an upper chamber, where, finding besides scarlet cloaks, buff suits, arms of all sorts, and other such rich chaffer, at such an exigent, escheatable to the prevalent soldier,) seven large portmantles full of precious commodity; in three whereof, after a most exact search for gold, silver, apparel, linen, or any whatever adornments to the

body, or pocket implements, as was seized upon in the other four, not hitting on any thing but manuscripts in folio to the quantity of six score and eight quires and a half, divided into six hundred forty and two quinternions and upwards, the quinternion consisting of five sheets, and the quire of five and twenty; besides some writ ings of suits in law and bonds, in both worth above three thousand pounds English; they, in a trice, carried all whatever else was in the room away save those papers, which they then threw down on the floor as unfit for their use; yet immediately thereafter, when upon carts the aforesaid baggage was put to be transported to the country, and that by the example of many hundreds of both horse and foot, whom they had loaded with spoil, they were assaulted with the temptation of a new booty, they apprehending how useful the paper might be to them, went back for it and bore it straight away; which done, to every one of those their comerads whom they met with in the streets they gave as much thereof for packeting up of raisins, figs, dates, almonds, caraways, and other such like dry confections, and other ware, as was requisite; who doing the same themselves, did, together with the others, kindle pipes of tobacco with a great part thereof, and threw out all the remainder upon the street, save so much as they deemed necessary for inferior employments and posterior uses. Of these dispersedly rejected bundles of paper, some were gathered up by grocers, druggists, chandlers, pie-makers, or such as stood in need of any cartapaciatory utensil, and put in present service, to the utter undoing of all the writing thereof, both in its matter and order, &c.", P. 13.

The first part of the treatise itself relates to Sir Thomas Urquhart's project for constructing an universal language; of which your readers will judge from the following extracts:

"Now, to the end the reader may be more enamoured of the language wherein I am to publish a grammar and a lexicon, I will here set down some few qualities and advantages peculiar to itself, and which no language else (although all other concurred with it) is able to reach unto. First, there is not a word utterable by the mouth of man which, in this language, hath not a peculiar signification by it

self. Every word in this language signifieth as well backward as forward, and however you invert the letters, still shall you fall upon significant words. There is no language in the world but for every word thereof it will afford you another of the same signification, of equal syllables with it, and beginning or ending, or both, with vowels or consonants as it doth. By virtue hereof, there is no hexameter, elegiack, saphick, asclepiad, iambick, or any other kind of Latine or Greek verse; but I will afford you another in this language, of the same sort, without a syllable more or less in the one than the other, sponda answering to spondæ, dactil to dactil, cæsure to cesure, and each foot to the other with all uniformity imaginable. In the framing of rime, the well versed in that language shall have so little labour, that for every word therein he shall be able to furnish, at least, five hundred several monosyllables of the same termination with it. In translating verses of any vernaculary tongue, such as Italian, French, Spanish, Slavonian, Dutch, Irish, English, or whatever it be, it affords you words of the same signification, syllable for syllable, and at the closure of each line a rime is in the original. The language affordeth so concise words for numbering, that the number for setting down whereof would require, in vulgar arithmetic, more figures in a row than there might be grains of sand containable from the center of the earth to the highest heavens, is in it expressed by two letters. In the denomination of the fixed stars it afforded the most significant way imaginary; for by the single word alone which represents the star, you shall know the magnitude, together with the longitude and latitude, both in degrees and minutes, of the star that is expressed by it.In matter of colours we shall learn, by words in this language, the proportion of light, shadow, or darkness, commixed in them. This language will be so convenient, that if a general, according to the rules thereof, will give new names to his soldiers, whether horse, foot, or dragoons, as the French used to do their infantry by their noms de guerre, he shall be able, at the first hearing of the word that represents the name of a soldier, to know of what brigade, regiment, troop, company, squadron or division, he is,

Vol. VI.

and whether he be of the cavalry or of the foot, a single soldier or an offi cer, or belonging to the artillery or baggage. The greatest wonder of all is, that of all the languages in the world it is the easiest to learn, a boy of ten years old being able to attaine to the knowledge thereof in three months space."

Of the practicability of projects never completed, and of the reality of discoveries never divulged, it is difficult to judge; yet it is hardly possi→ ble to avoid placing Sir Thomas Urquhart's invention with the discoveries of many other men of heated imaginations and sanguine temperaments, who prosecute with avidity a search after impossibilities, and become themselves the first dupes of their folly. That he actually believed himself capable of constructing a language uniting so many and such opposite and contrary properties-and comprehending all the facility of the most barren with all the variety of the most complex and extensive languages, there is no reason to doubt; but whatever we concede to his sincerity will be at the expense of his judgment. Yet, as a mind curious and sagacious as Sir Thomas Urquhart's cannot but produce something worthy of notice, it is to be lamented that his project was never further prosecuted. His observations show, that he had considered the subject with much and mature deliberation, and that literature has suffered no small detriment by the failure of his scheme. It matters little, whether his invention, when made public, would have answered to the character he has given it; for, as a great author observes," in an hypothesis it is not always the theory itself which is to be regarded, but oftentimes the sparks and scintillations which irregularly fly off from it."

He next proceeds, syllogistically, to demonstrate how reasonable a recompense his liberation would be in return for the benefit which his project, when completed, would produce. "And," says he, "the invention is to be estimated at a rate much inferior to the inventor, from whose brains have already issued offsprings, every whit as consideralle with parturiencie for greater births, if a malevolent time disobstetricate not their enixibility." Amongst which inventions, to use his words a little before, "I ascribe unto 40

myself the invention of the trissotetrail trigonometry, for facility of calculation by representatives of letters and syllables; the proving of the equipollencie and opposition, both of plain and modal enunciations by rules of geometry; the unfolding of the chiefer part of philosophy by a continuated geographical allegory, and above a hundred other several books on different subjects, the conceit of so much as one whereof never entered into the brains of any before myself." And I may here observe, that, as I have good reason to believe, Sir Thomas was the real author of that singular production, "A century of names and scantlings of inventions," the credit or discredit of which was dishonestly assumed by the Marquis of Worcester.

In the remainder of the book, which consists of an account of eminent Scotsmen, Sir Thomas complains most heavily of the injuries he had suffered from some of the presbyterian ministers, and of the covetousness of his countrymen, of whose conduct he gives the following bitter account :There hath been in London, and repairing to it for these many years together, a knot of Scottish bankers, collybists, or coin coursers of traffickers in merchdandize, to and again, and of men of other professions, who by hook and crook, fas et nefas, slight and might, (all being as fish their net could catch,) having feathered their nests to some purpose, look so idolatrously upon their Dagon of wealth, and so closely (like the earth's dull center,) hug all unto themselves, that no respect of virtue, honour, kindred, patriotism, or whatever else, (be it never so recommendable,) will they depart from so much as one single penny, whose emission doth not, without any hazard of loss, in a very short time supertuerate beyond all conscience, an additional increase to the heap of that stock which they so much adore; which churlish and tenacious humour hath made many that were not acquainted with any thing else of that country, to imagine all their compatriots infected with the same leprosie of a wretched peevishness; whereof those quomodo cunquizing clusterfists, and rapacious valets, have given of late such cannibal-like proofs, by their inhumanity and obdurate carriage towards some, (whose shoestrings they are not worthy

to untie ;) that were it not that a more able pen than mine will assuredly not fail to jerk them on all sides, in case, by their better demeanour for the future, they endeavour not to wipe off the blot wherewith their native country, by their sordid avarice and miserable baseness, hath been so foully stained. I would at this very instant blaze them out in their names and surnames, notwithstanding the vizard of presbyterian zeal wherewith they make themselves; that, like so many wolves, foxes, or Athenian Timons, they might in all times coming be debarred the benefit of any honest conversation." And the zealous knight further declares, "that to wipe off its obloquy, I would undertake a pilgrimage to old Judea, visit the ruins of Jerusa lem, and trace the footsteps of Zedekiah's fellow-captives to the gates of Babylon."

Amongst the eminent Scotsmen he commemorates, are the Earl of Bothwell, Colonel Douglas, Critchton, Sir John Hume, Francis Sinclair, Alexander Ross, Doctor Seaton, Cameron, called the universal library, Dempster, Arthur Jonstoun, Doctor Liddel, Sir William Alexander, and Doctor William Forbes. Of these, the account of Critchton is the longest and the most entertaining; but from this, as it has frequently been quoted, I shall not give any extract.

A good general places his best forces in the rear, and in like manner Sir Thomas plants his chief battery of hard words at the end. For whatever sesquipedalia verba occur in the preceding part of the book, are certainly nothing when compared to the following tremendous explosion.

"I could truly," says the author, "have enlarged this discourse with a choice variety of phrase, and made it overflow the field of the reader's understanding, with an inundation of greater eloquence, and that one way, tropologetically by metonymical, ironical, metaphorical, and synecdochical instruments of elocution, in all their several kinds, artificially affected according to the nature of the subject; with emphatical expressions in things of greater concernment; with catachretical in matters of meaner moment; attended on each side, respectively, with an epiplectick and exegetick modification; with hyperbolical, either epitetically or hypocoristically,

*

MR EDITOR, Ir is a curious circumstance, that, although the Romans held for several ages possession of the greatest part ofthis island, there is not among all the British antiquities a single monument of the fine arts which can be regarded as the work of that magnificent people. We have many traces of their military stations; a few fragments of Mosaic pavements belonging to Baths; but templet or portico, idol or altar, not one has ever been found; and yet Tacitus says, that during the administration of Agricola, that distinguished commander excited among the Britons a taste for the Roman arts and customs: their towns were adorned with stately temples and porticoes, and their youth imitated the fashions of Rome. What renders the circumstance the more wonderful, is, that there are several British remains, which are considered of an anterior date to the invasion of the Romans. The Arx diaboli at Castleton in Derbyshire, was a ruin in their time, and its origin unknown.

Nor should it be forgotten, that Adrian, who adorned so many remote parts of the empire with the most sumptuous edifices, resided some time in this island; but no relic of his visit, or of the architecture of his age, remains. In a word, the historian of the arts, who undertakes to relate their rise and progress in this country, must commence his narrative at a period subsequent to the recall of the Roman legions.

In reflecting on this matter, it has sometimes occurred to me, that what our old chronicles say respecting the very early establishment of Christianity in Britain, is deserving of more deference than is commonly paid to it, and that it helps to throw some light on a question in itself extremely curious. You are aware, sir, that among the first effects which flowed from the establishment of Christianity

in other parts of the Roman empire, was the awakening of a spirit in the public, adverse alike to the belief, ritual, and pageantry, of idolatry; that it tended to bring the amusements of the theatre into disrepute, and to banish from the stage all dramatic performances in honour of the mythologic deities, without substituting any other exhibitions; so that the theatres became deserted, and in the end totally ruined.

About the time that the preaching of the gospel began to affect the public mind throughout the eastern provinces of the empire, the Romans acquired their first firm footing on the shores of this island. When they had established themselves in the interior, Christianity was so generally diffused, that it is not probable they attempted to introduce dramatic representations among the Britons, in any such way as to require the use of large buildings. This will account for the total extinction, if the term may be applied to what I conceive never had any existance, of all theatric monuments of the Romans in the list of our national antiquities. Mr Curwen, in his letters from Ireland, describes the models of two ancient theatres in the museum of Dublin, said to have been recently discovered, still existing in that island; but nothing of the kind, nothing in reality, which indicates any effectual civil domiciliation of the Romans in Britain, has yet been found.

With regard to temples and idols, the question is susceptible of a satisfactory explanation, if we admit the authority of the chroniclers; and I know not why, in many things, and this among others, they are not deemed as deserving of credit as the Roman historians, or those of any other ancient people. It appears, by them, that Lucius, who succeeded his father in the British throne in the year 165, was with his courtiers and nobles converted to Christianity, and that he not