Maitland Club > Works of Sir Thomas Urquhart

224 EK2KTBAAATPON.
to himself the inward satisfaction he conceived, for having so opportunely discharged
his duty to the House of Mantua.
The reader perhaps will think this wonderful ; and so would I too, were it not that
I know, as Sir Philip Sydney sayes, that a wonder is no wonder in a wonderful sub-
ject, and consequently not in him, who for his learning, judgement, valour, eloquence,
beauty, and good-fellowship, was the perfectest result of the joynt labour of the per-
fect number of those six deities, Pallas, Apollo, Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Bacchus,
that hath been seen since the dayes of Alcibiades ; for he was reported to have been
inriched with a memory so prodigious, that any sermon, speech, harangue, or other
manner of discourse of an hour's continuance, he was able to recite without hesitation,
after the same manner of gesture and pronuntiation, in all points, wherewith it was
delivered at first ; and of so stupendious a judgment and conception, that almost natu-
rally he understood quiddities of philosophy ; and as for the abstrusest and most re-
searched mysteries of other disciplines, arts, and faculties, the intentional species of
them were as readily obvious to the interiour view and perspicacity of his mind, as
those of the common visible colours to the external sight of him that will open his
eyes to look upon them ; of which accomplishment and Encyclopedia of knowledge,
he gave on a time so marvelous a testimony at Paris, that the words of Admirabilis
Scotus, the Wonderful Scot, in all the several tongues and idiomes of Europ, were,
for a great while together, by the most of the echos resounded to the peircing of the
very clouds. To so great a hight and vast extent of praise, did the never too much
to be extolled reputation of the seraphick wit of that eximious man attaine, for his
commanding to be affixed programs, on all the gates of the schooles, halls, and col-
ledges of that famous university, as also on all the chief pillars and posts standing be-
fore the houses of the most renowned men for literature, resident within the precinct
of the walls and suburbs of that most populous and magnificent city, inviting them
all, or any whoever else versed in any kinde of scholastick faculty, to repaire at nine
of the clock in the morning of such a day, moneth, and yeer, as by computation came
to be just six weeks after the date of the affixes, to the common schoole of the colledge
of Navarre, where, at the prefixed time, he should, God willing, be ready to answer
to what should be propounded to him concerning any science, liberal art, discipline,
or faculty, practical or theoretick, not excluding the theological nor jurisprudential
habits, though grounded but upon the testimonies of God and man, and that in any
of these twelve languages, Hebrew, Syriack, Arabick, Greek, Latin, Spanish, French,
Italian, English, Dutch, Flemish, and Sclavonian, in either verse or prose, at the
discretion of the disputant ; which high enterprise and hardy undertaking, by way of
challenge to the learndst men in the world, damped the wits of many able scholars to
consider whether it was the attempt of a fanatick spirit, or lofty designe of a well-
poised judgment ; yet after a few days enquiry concerning him, when information was
got of his incomparable endowments, all the choicest and most profound philosophers,