Alasdair Gray - Unlikely Stories Mostly

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.

CAMERON, AGNAMED THE WALKING LIBRARY: who being renowned through all the provinces of France for his universal reading, took occasion to set forth an excellent folio volume in Latin intituled Bibliotheca Movens.

MASTER ALEXANDER ROSSE: who hath written manyer books, both in good Latine and English, prose and verse, than he hath years, and whose Poeticus proveth, that the Pagan Gods are but names for the separated faculties of our TRIUN GOD, so that Christians need no longer lie under the reproach which the Oriental nations fixe upon us, of seeing with but one eye, for Master Rosse hath so vindicated in matter of knowledge our Western World, as to make the Chineses, by force of reason, of whose authority above them they are not ashamed, glad to confess that the Europaeans, as well as themselves, look out of both their eyes and have no blinkered minds.

MELVIL: who has six hundred ducats a year, for translating into Latine or Spanish, some hundred few books of these six hundred great volumes, taken by Don Juan de Austria at the battel of Lepanto from the Great Turk, which now lie in the great library of that magnifick palace the Es-corial near Madrid.

DEMPSTER: who is chiefly recommended to posterity for his Latin index of five thousand illustrious Scots from the earliest ages to the last liver whereof dyed above fifty years since.

CHALMERS: bishop of Neems.

CHIZUM: bishop of Vezun.

TYRY: assistant to the General of the Jesuites, and second person in that vast ecclesiastical republick, which reaches beyond the territories of all Christian kings to cover the continent of the World.

KING JAMES 6th AND 1st: History cannot afford us (Solomon and Alfonso of Aragon being laid aside) any monarch who was near as learned as he, as is apparent by that book in folio intituled, “King James His Works”; despite that peevish remark by the young king’s old tutor, the republican pedagogue George Buchanan, that the king’s faculty as a scholar, equalled his notorious deficiency as a souldier, since by skelping the arse of the Lord’s annoynted the best he (Buchanan) had been able to make of poor Jamie was a pedant, as the Royal Steward lacked substance to shape anything better. PRO ME

Deeds Armorial:In my early years, to ripen my brains for eminent undertakings, my heart gave me courage to adventure through foreign climes, wherein it thrice befell me to enter the lists against men of three several nations, to vindicate my native country from the slanders wherewith they had aspersed it. God was pleased so to conduct my fortune that, after I had disarmed them, they in such sort acknowledged their error, and the obligation they did owe me for sparing their lives, that in lieu of three enemies that were I acquired three constant friends both to myself and my nation, which by several gallant testimonies they did later prove, in many occasions. Thus I outdid the Gasco-nad of France, Rodomontad of Spaine, Fanfaronad of Italy, and Bragadochio brags of all other countries, who could no more astonish my invincible young heart, than could the cheeping of a mouse a bear robbed of her whelps.

Then in the May month of 1639, when 120 °Covenanters of the North assembled at Turrif, I with a loyal force of but 800, did altogether repel, route and disperse them, with no advantage on our side but complete surprize and four brass cannon. Thus was quelled the first armed mustering against the monarchy since Mary Steward fled Langside field. Thus issued the first battel in this most uncivil War. Would to Jehovus the loyalists had done so well since. CONTRA ME

Deeds Armorial:Nothing, in that never was I in any fight defeated, though sometimes obliged to withdraw before overwhelming power, as hath befallen Scipio Africanus, Robert de Bruis and Adolphus Maleus Caesarorum. PRO ME

Deeds Minerval:(completed and potential) whereby my name will resound to the end day of alltime, by reason of, these shining books which will work huge reformation, transformation and revolution in every branch of human tecknics, politics and thought.

1. EPIGRAMS: DIVINE AND MORAL

The Muses never yet inspired sublimer conceptions in a more refined style, than is to be found in the accurate strains of these most ingenious Epigrams. Printed in London, 1641.

2. THE TRISSOTETRAS

Wherein I set forth, with all possible brevity and perspecuity, orthogonospherical and loxogonospherical tables which permit the easy application of Neper’s logarythms to every dimension of space and any volume of bulk, and by resolving those cranklings, windings, turnings, involutions and amfractuosities belonging to the equisoleary system, I facilitate and reform the work of all artists in pleusiotechny, poliechryology, cosmography, geography, astronomy, geodesy, gnomonicks, catoptricks, dioptricks, fortification, navigation and chiaroscuro. Printed in London 1645, last week.

3. TTANTOXPONOXANON

A peculiar promptuary of time, wherein is recorded the exact lineal descent of the VRQUARTS since the beginning of motion. Unprinted.

4. ISOPLASTFONIKON

Demonstrating the cubification of the sphere through Pythagorean acousticks, whereby a well-tuned fiddle or taut kettledrum may be perswaded to yield the exact side of a squared solid equal in volume to any symmetrical rotundity whatsoever. Unprinted.

5. FOINIXPANKROMATA

or, the Rainbow-Phoenix, wherein is counter-blasted Signor Galileo’s contention that colour is meer sensation, by proving that the boundless prime matter of the universe is not the Water of Thales, Air of Anaximenes, Fire of Heraclitus, Atoms of Democritus or Quadressential Porridge of Trismegistus, but white light; that gold, green, azure, deep-sea blue, violet, purple, crimson and pink are light in decay; that self-colours through the Macrocosm creates, not just its appearance, but its tangible, fructible, frangible bodies; and that darkness is light. travelling backward too fast to be catched by the eye. Unprinted.

6. ALETHALEMBIKON