It is worth while to compare the passage in Rabelais which describes the similar feats of the giant Pantagruel with the account Sir Thomas Urquhart gives of Crichton's intellectual tournaments.[210] To us there seems something very ridiculous in the practice of posting up placards on the walls, challenging all-comers to disputation, but in the sixteenth century it would not necessarily appear in this light. Rabelais, indeed, laughed at it; but then he laughed at many things which the people of his time did not think absurd. John Hill Burton is of the opinion that Sir Thomas Urquhart, in describing the way in which Crichton conducted himself on the field which had witnessed Pantagruel's feats, had the ridicule of Rabelais in view, and that, in spite of his laudations, we cannot help having the impression that his tongue is all the time in his cheek. We think that this is unfair to Sir Thomas. There is no reason why those who looked on in admiration at a real tournament should not also enjoy seeing a burlesque one. So that it is quite possible that our author smiled while he translated the French satire, and that he glowed with honest pride and admiration as he recounted his fellow-countryman's exploits before the University of Paris. After serving for a couple of years in the French army, Crichton journeyed into Italy, and in the month of August, 1580, arrived in Venice. He made the acquaintance of the famous printer, Aldus Manutius, who introduced him to the principal men of learning and note in that city. Here he maintained the reputation he had acquired in Paris, and lives of him were written and published. From Venice he proceeded to Padua, and from thence to the Court of Mantua, where the adventure occurred with which Sir Thomas Urquhart begins the narrative of his celebrated fellow-countryman's exploits, namely, the defeat and death of the travelling bravo, whose challenge he had accepted. Sir Thomas is the only authority for this incident in Crichton's history. As there is no reason to believe that he invented it, we are at liberty to suppose that he found it in some one of the lives of Crichton which he met with in his Italian travels, but which has not come down to us, or that he heard of it from some of those who witnessed it. For, as Urquhart was born only twenty-three years after Crichton's death, he must, in the course of his continental travels, have met some who were his contemporaries.[211]