A writer in _Blackwood's Magazine_ in 1820 affirms that he has good reasons for believing that the above volume was really by Sir Thomas Urquhart, and was dishonestly put forth as the work of the Marquis of Worcester. He does not give us any of his reasons. The style of the little volume bears no resemblance to that of our author, and this fact is of itself almost conclusive proof that Sir Thomas Urquhart had nothing to do with it. The Scottish knight could scarcely open his lips without revealing his identity. It is rather difficult to believe, too, that a manuscript lost by Sir Thomas in the streets of Worcester should have been picked up by the Marquis of Worcester. The coincidence would be a very extraordinary one. [230] Hear Heine's angry allusions to his early scholastic experiences, in which he suggests another and less honourable origin of the Greek tongue: "Vom Griechischen will ich gar nicht sprechen--ich ärgere mich sonst zu viel. Die Mönche im Mittelalter hatten so ganz Unrecht nicht, wenn sie behaupteten, dass das Griechische eine Erfindung des Teufels sei" (_Das Buch Le Grand_, vii.). [231] Sanskrit, Old Persian, Lithuanian, and old Slavonic have the dual both in declension and conjugation, and in the first of these it is used much more frequently than in Greek. Faint traces of it in declension are to be found in Teutonic speech, though in conjugation it is only in the Gothic that the dual is used. In old Gaelic the dual is a regular feature of declension, but not of conjugation. CHAPTER VII TRANSLATION OF RABELAIS The foundation on which Sir Thomas Urquhart's literary fame securely rests is his translation into English of the first three books of the works of Rabelais. Of these the first and second appeared in two separate volumes in the year 1653--exactly a century after the death of the great French satirist--and the third was published by Pierre Antoine Motteux in 1693, long after Sir Thomas's own death.[232] The difficulty, singularity, and obscurity of the writings of Rabelais had probably been hindrances in the way of their being presented to the English public in their own tongue; for, though the register of the Stationers' Company preserves a record of two attempts at translation, these seem to have been but fragmentary, and to have dropped still-born from the press. The works themselves are not known to be extant, and nothing more than the bare name of them survives.