Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

Never was there a proprietor less in danger of sinking into the easy apathetical indolence of the mere country gentleman; for, impressed with a belief that he was born to enlarge the limits of all science, he applied himself to the study of every branch of human learning, and, having mastered what was already known, and finding the amount but little, he seriously set himself to add to it. And first, as learning can be communicated only by the aid of language, “words being the signs of things,” he deemed it evident that, if language be imperfect, learning must of necessity be so likewise; quite on the principle that a defect in the carved figure of a signet cannot fail of being transmitted to the image formed by it on the wax. The result of his inquiries on this subject differed only a very little from the conclusion which, when pursuing a similar course of study, the celebrated Lord Monboddo arrived at more than a hundred years after. His Lordship believed that all languages, except Greek, are a sort of vulgar dialects which have grown up rather through accident than design, and exhibit, in consequence, little else than a tissue of defects both in sound and sense. Greek, however, he deemed a perfect language; and he accounted for its superiority by supposing that, in some early age of the world, it had been constructed on philosophical principles, out of one of the old jargons, by a society of ingenious grammarians, who afterwards taught it to the common people. Sir Thomas went a little further; for, not excepting even the Greek, he condemned every language, ancient and modern, and set himself to achieve what, according to Monboddo, had been already achieved by the grammarians of Greece. And hence his ingenious but unfortunate work, “The Universal Language.”

“A tree,” he thus reasoned, “is known by its leaves, a stone by its grit, a flower by the smell, meats by the taste, music by the ear, colours by the eye,” and, in short, all the several natures of things by the qualities or aspects with which they address themselves to the senses or the intellect. And it is from these obvious traits of similarity or difference that the several classes are portioned by the associative faculty into the corresponding cells of understanding and memory. But it is not thus with words in any of the existing languages. Things the most opposite in nature are often represented by signs so similar that they can hardly be distinguished, and things of the same class by signs entirely different. Language is thus formed so loosely and unskilfully, that the associative faculty cannot be brought to bear on it;—one great cause why foreign languages are so difficult to learn, and when once learned, so readily forgotten. And there is a radical defect in the alphabets of all languages; for in all, without exception, do the nominal number of letters fall far short of the real, a single character being arbitrarily made to represent a variety of sounds. Hence it happens that the people of one country cannot acquaint themselves by books alone with the pronunciation of another. The words, too, proper to express without circumvolution all the multiform ideas of the human mind, are not to be found in any one tongue; and though the better languages have borrowed largely from each other to supply their several deficiencies, even the more perfect are still very incomplete. Hence the main difficulty of translation. Some languages are fluent without exactness. Hence an unprofitable wordiness, devoid of force and precision. Others, comparatively concise, are harsh and inharmonious. Hence, perhaps, the grand cause why some of the civilized nations (the Dutch for instance), though otherwise ingenious, make but few advances compared with others, in philology and the belles-lettres.

These, concluded Sir Thomas, are the great defects of language. In a perfect language, then, it is fundamentally necessary that there should be classes of resembling words to represent the classes of resembling things—that every idea should have its sign, and every simple sound its alphabetical character. It is necessary, too, that there should be a complete union of sweetness, energy, and precision. Setting himself down in the old castle of Cromarty to labour on these principles for the benefit of all mankind, and the glory of his country, he constructed his Universal Tongue. There is little difficulty, when we remember where he wrote, in tracing the origin of his metaphor, when he says of the existing languages, that though they may be improved in structure “by the striking out of new light and doors, the outjetting of kernels, and the erecting of prickets and barbicans,” they are yet restricted to a certain base, beyond which they must not be enlarged. In his own language the base was fitted to the superstructure. His alphabet consisted of ten vowels, and twenty-five consonants. His radical classes of words amounted to two hundred and fifty, and, to use his own allegory, were the denizens of so many cities divided into streets, which were again subdivided into lanes, the lanes into houses, the houses into storeys, and the storeys into apartments. It was impossible that the natives of one city should be confounded with those of another; and by prying into their component letters and syllables, the street, lane, house, storey, and apartment of every citizen, could be ascertained without a possibility of mistake. Simple ideas were expressed by monosyllables, and every added syllable expressed an added idea. So musical was this language, that for poetical composition it surpassed every other; so concise, that the weightiest thoughts could be expressed in it by a few syllables, in some instances by a single word; so precise, that even sounds and colours could be expressed by it in all their varieties of tone and shade; and so comprehensive, that there was no word in any language, either living or dead, that could not be translated into it without suffering the slightest change of meaning. And, with all its rich variety of phrase, so completely was it adapted to the associative faculty, that it was possible for a boy of ten years thoroughly to master it in the short space of three months! The entire work, consisting of a preface, grammar, and lexicon, was comprised in a manuscript of twelve hundred folio pages.

Laborious as this work must have proved, it was only one of a hundred great works completed by Sir Thomas before he had attained his thirty-eighth year, and all in a style so exquisitely original, that neither in subject nor manner had he been anticipated in so much as one of them. He had designed, and in part digested, four hundred more. A complete list of these, with such a description of each as I have here attempted of his Universal Language, would be, perhaps, one of the greatest literary curiosities ever exhibited to the world; but so unfortunate was he, as an author, that the very names of the greater number of the works he finished have died with himself, while the names of his projected ones were, probably, never known to any one else. He prepared for the press a treatise on Arithmetic, intended to remedy some defects in the existing system. The invention of what he terms the “Trissotetrail Trigonometry for the facilitating of calculations by representations of letters and syllables,” was the subject of a second treatise; and the proving of the Equipollencic and Opposition both of Plain and Modal Enunciations by rules of Geometry (I use his own language, for I am not scholar enough to render it into common English), he achieved in a third. A fourth laid open the profounder recesses of the Metaphysics by a continued Geographical Allegory. He was the author also of ten books of Epigrams, in all about eleven hundred in number, which he “contryved, blocked, and digested,” he says, “in a thirteen weeks tyme;” and of this work the manuscript still exists. It is said to contain much bad verse, and much exceptionable morality; but at least one of its stanzas, quoted by Dr. Irvine, in his elaborate and scholarlike Biographies of Scottish writers, possesses its portion of epigrammatic point.

“A certain poetaster, not long since,

Said I might follow him in verse and prose;

But, truly if I should, ’tis as a prince

Whose ushers walk before him as he goes.”

In Blackwood’s Magazine for 1820, in a short critique on the Jewel, it is stated that the writer had “good reasons to believe Sir Thomas to be 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.” The “good” reasons are not given; nor am I at all sure that they would be found particularly good; for the Marquis is a well-known man; and yet, were intrinsic evidence to be alone consulted, it might be held that either this little tract was written by Sir Thomas, or, what might be deemed less probable, that the world, nay, the same age and island, had produced two Sir Thomases.[6] Some little weight, too, might be attached to the facts, that many of his manuscripts were lost in the city of Worcester, with which place, judging from his title, it is probable the Marquis may have had some connexion, by residence or otherwise; and that the “Century of Names” was not published until 1663, two years after death had disarmed poor Sir Thomas of his sword and his pen, and rendered him insensible to both his country’s honour and his own. If in reality the author of this piece, he must be regarded, it is said, as the original inventor of the steam-engine.

But the merit of the most curious of all his treatises no one has ventured to dispute with him—a work entitled “The True Pedigree and Lineal Descent of the Ancient and Honourable Family of Urquhart.” It records the names of all the fathers of the family, from the days of Adam to those of Sir Thomas; and may be regarded as forming no bad specimen of the inverted climax—beginning with God, the creator of all things, and ending with the genealogist himself. One of his ancestors he has married (for he was a professed lover of the useful) to a daughter of what the Abbé Pluche deemed an Egyptian symbol of husbandry, and another to a descendant of what Bacon regarded as a personification of human fortitude. In his notice of the arms of the family he has surpassed all the heralds who have flourished before or since. The first whose bearings he describes is Esormon, sovereign prince of Achaia, the father of all such as bear the name of Urquhart, and the fifth from Japhet by lineal descent. His arms were three banners, three ships, and three ladies in a field; or, the crest, a young lady holding in her right hand a brandished sword, and in her left a branch of myrtle; the supporters, two Javanites attired after the soldier habit of Achaia; and the motto, Tαῦτα ἡ τρια ἀξιοθεάτα—These three are worthy to behold. Heraldry and Greek were alike anticipated by the genius of this family. The device of Esormon was changed about six hundred years after, under the following very remarkable circumstances. Molin, a celebrated descendant of this prince, and a son-in-law of Deucalion and Pyrrha, accompanied Galethus, the Æneas of Scotland, to the scene of his first colony, a province of Africa, which in that age, as in the present, was infested with wild beasts. He excelled in hunting; and having in one morning killed three lions, he carried home their heads in a large basket, and presented it to his wife Panthea, then pregnant with her first child. Unconscious of what the basket contained, she raised the lid, and, filled with horror and astonishment by the apparition of the heads, she struck her hand against her left side, exclaiming, in the suddenness of her surprise, “O Hercules! what is this?” By a wonderful sympathy, the likeness of the three heads, grim and horrible as they appeared in the basket, was impressed on the left side of the infant, who afterwards became a famous warrior, and transferred to his shield the badge which nature had thus bestowed upon him. The external ornaments of the bearings remained unaltered until the days of Astorimon, who, after his victory over Ethus, changed the myrtle branch of the lady for one of palm, and the original motto for Eὐνοεῖτω, εὐλόγε, καὶ εὐπράττε—Mean, speak, and do well. Both the shield and the supporters underwent yet another change in the reign of Solvatious of Scotland, who, in admiration of an exploit achieved by the Urquhart and his two brothers in the great Caledonian forest, converted the lions’ heads into the heads of bears, and the armed Javanites of Esormon into a brace of greyhounds. And such were the arms of the family in the days of Sir Thomas, as shown by the curious stone lintel now at Kinbeakie.