FOR THE THIRTEENTH LEWIS OF FRANCE AGAINST THE DUTCH AND SPANISH
Lord Colvil
Lord James Douglas
Sir William Hepburn
Hepburn of Wachton
(Had these survived the days wherein they successively dyed the bed of honour, they had all of them been made Marischals of France)
Sir Andrew Gray
Sir John Seatoun
Sir John Fularton
Sir Patrick Moray
Colonel Erskin
Colonel Lindsay
Colonel Morison
Colonel Hume
Colonel Mouatt
Colonel Liviston
Colonel Leslie
Colonel Forbes
FOR VENICE AGAINST THE GERMAN EMPEROR
Colonel Dowglas
Colonel Balantine
Colonel Lyon
Colonel Anderson
FOR VENICE AGAINST THE TURK
Captain William Scot, vice-Admiral of the Venetian fleet, the onely renowned bane and terror of Mahometan navigators, for he did so tort and ferret them out of all the creeks of the Adriatic gulph that many of them, for fear of him, did turn land-souldiers or drovers of caravans.
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From this list I have omitted all mention of gallant Scottish duelists such as Francis Sinclair, natural son to the late Earle of Catnes, who performed this notable exploit in the city of Madrid: Eight Spanish noblemen being suspicious of Sinclair’s too intimate familiarity with a kinswoman of theirs, did altogether set on him at one time, which unexpected assault moved him to say:
“Gentlemen, I doubt not but you are valiant men, therefor my entreaty is that you take it as becomes men of valour, by trying your fortune against mine, one at a time.”
The Spaniards pretending to be men of honour, swore by an oath made on their crossed swords that they should not faile therein; in a word, conform to paction, they fell to it, and that most cleverly, though with such fatality on the Spanish side, that in less than the space of half an hour he killed seven of them apassyterotically, that is, one after another; gratifying the eightth, to testifie that he had done no wrong to the rest, with enjoyment of his life. As for pricking down here those other Scots renowned for valour and for literature, I hold it not expedient; for the sum of those named doth fall so far short of the number omitted, that apportioned to the aggregate of all who in that nation since the year 1600, have deserved praise in arms and arts, jointly or disjunctly, either at home or abroad, it would bear the analogy, to use a lesser definite for a greater indefinite, of a subnovitri-partient eights; that is to say, in plain English, the whole being the dividend, and my nomenclature the divisor, the quotient would be nine, with a fraction of three-eights; or yet more clearly, as the proportion of 72 to 625. But let me resume the account of my especial self by inditing: ARTS
LORD NEPER OF MARCHISTON. The artificial numbers by him first excogitated and perfected are of such incomparable use, that by them we may operate more in one day than without them in the space of a week; a secret that would have been so precious to antiquitie, that Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes and Euclid would have joyntly concurred in deifying the revealer of so great a mystery. My country is more glorious for producing so brave a spark, than if it had been the conquering kingdom of a hundred potent nations. Neper also had the skill (as is commonly reported) to frame an engine which, by virtue of some secret springs, implements and substances inclosed within the bowels thereof, could clear a field of four miles circumference or more (proportional to its bigness, for he could make it any size at all) of all living creatures exceeding a foot in hight, by which he was able to have killed thirty thousand turkes, without the hazard of one Christian. Of this, upon a wager, he gave proof on a large plaine in Scotland, to the destruction of a great many herds of cattel and flocks of sheep, whereof some were distant from other half a mile, some a whole mile. When earnestly desired by an old acquaintance, at the time he contracted the disease whereof he died, not to take the invention of so ingenious a mystery with him to the tomb; he replied, That for the ruine and overthrow of mankind there were already too many divices framed, which, since the malice and rancor in the heart of man would not suffer these to diminish, by no conceit of his would their number be increased. Divinely spoken, truly.
CRICHTON * AGNAMED THROUGHOUT EUROPE ADMIRABILIS SCOTUS OR THE WONDERFUL SCOT:
who in one day at the Sorbonne in Paris, from nine in the morning to six at night, did argue in Hebrew, Syriack, Arabick, Greek, Latin, Italian, English, Flemish, Dutch, Spanish, French and Sclavonian, in prose and verse, at his disputants’ discretion, thereby resolving the knurriest problems propounded to him by the choicest and most profound philosophers, mathematicians, naturalists, mediciners, surgeons, apothecaries, alchymists, civil law doctors, canon law doctors, grammarians, rhetoricians and logicians in that greatest of all cities which is truly called the Abridgement of the World; and ilucting the most umbraged obscurities, and prostrating the sublimest mysteries to the vulgar capacity, by the easie and accurate promptness of his speech. When the Rector of the University awarded him a purse of gold and a diamond ring, the nimblewitted Parisians raized such thundering plaudities that the rarified air over the echoing concavities of the colleges could not support the birds in flight, who fell from the sky in a feathered showr. And the very next day to refresh his brains, as he said, went to the Louvre in a buff-suit, more like a favourite of Mars than one of the Muses’ minions; where in the presence of the Court and great ladies, he carryed away the ring fifteen times on end, and broke as many lances on the Saracen. The picture of Crichton, with a lance in one hand and a book in the other, is to be seen in the bedchambers and galleries of most of the great men of the Italian nation, where he was murdered in a fitte of jealous rage by the Prince of Mantua; and most of the young ladies likewise, that were anything handsome, had his effigies in a little oval tablet of gold hanging twixt their breasts, for many yeeres that intermarnmilionary ornament being held as necessary for the setting forth of their accoutrements, as either fan, watch or stomacher.
DOCTOR SEATON: made Professor of the Roman Colledge of Sapience by Pope Urbane the eighth, but falling at ods with the Jesuites, he retired to France where I have seen him circled about at the Louvre with a ring of French Lords and gentlemen, the greatest clerics and churchmen, the albest barristers and advocates of the Parlement of Paris, all in perfect silence the better to congest the pearls of discernment falling from his lips into the treasuries of their judgements. Le Sieur de Balzac, who for eloquence was esteemed to surpass Cicero, presented to Seaton a golden pen, in token of his infinitely greater supereminency in that art. Many learned books were written by this Seaton in the Latin tongue, which, to speak ingenuously, I cannot hit upon.
HUGO DE GRIEVE: whose nativity in a dank border-town engirdled by many torrents so impressed his mind with the axiom everything flows, that he firmly fixed himself in those operations by which mind is changed, and made some 32 books of verses wherein antique and demotic tongues, political rhetoric and all the natural sciences are by violence yoked together to deny, prophetically simultaneously and retroactively, every conclusion he arrives at, excepting this: that the English are a race of Bastards. He thus engendered a manifold of grandly meaning sentences without system, for the which I did honour him, until compelled to bring against him a suit-at-law for his barefaced plagiarism of my LOGOPANDECTEISON, which suit requires but the enscrieving and publishment of the said LOGOPANDECTEISON to have this scheming and scurrilous succubus of other men’s genius brought low, and costs awarded to pursuer.