Thus words out of Rabelais, which he always translates with admirable skill, are frequent, and he attaches to them their author’s name.  So Rabelais had already crossed the Channel, and was read in his own tongue.  Somewhat later, during the full sway of the Commonwealth—­and Maitre Alcofribas Nasier must have been a surprising apparition in the midst of Puritan severity—­Captain Urquhart undertook to translate him and to naturalize him completely in England.

Thomas Urquhart belonged to a very old family of good standing in the North of Scotland.  After studying in Aberdeen he travelled in France, Spain, and Italy, where his sword was as active as that intelligent curiosity of his which is evidenced by his familiarity with three languages and the large library which he brought back, according to his own account, from sixteen countries he had visited.

On his return to England he entered the service of Charles I., who knighted him in 1641.  Next year, after the death of his father, he went to Scotland to set his family affairs in order, and to redeem his house in Cromarty.  But, in spite of another sojourn in foreign lands, his efforts to free himself from pecuniary embarrassments were unavailing.  At the king’s death his Scottish loyalty caused him to side with those who opposed the Parliament.  Formally proscribed in 1649, taken prisoner at the defeat of Worcester in 1651, stripped of all his belongings, he was brought to London, but was released on parole at Cromwell’s recommendation.  After receiving permission to spend five months in Scotland to try once more to settle his affairs, he came back to London to escape from his creditors.  And there he must have died, though the date of his death is unknown.  It probably took place after 1653, the date of the publication of the two first books, and after having written the translation of the third, which was not printed from his manuscript till the end of the seventeenth century.

His life was therefore not without its troubles, and literary activity must have been almost his only consolation.  His writings reveal him as the strangest character, fantastic, and full of a naive vanity, which, even at the time he was translating the genealogy of Gargantua—­surely well calculated to cure any pondering on his own—­caused him to trace his unbroken descent from Adam, and to state that his family name was derived from his ancestor Esormon, Prince of Achaia, 2139 B.C., who was surnamed Ourochartos, that is to say the Fortunate and the Well-beloved.  A Gascon could not have surpassed this.

Gifted as he was, learned in many directions, an enthusiastic mathematician, master of several languages, occasionally full of wit and humour, and even good sense, yet he gave his books the strangest titles, and his ideas were no less whimsical.  His style is mystic, fastidious, and too often of a wearisome length and obscurity; his verses rhyme anyhow, or not at all; but vivacity, force and heat are never lacking, and the Maitland Club did well in reprinting, in 1834, his various works, which are very rare.  Yet, in spite of their curious interest, he owes his real distinction and the survival of his name to his translation of Rabelais.