Crichton, JAMES, surnamed the 'Admirable,' son of Robert Crichton of Eliock, Dumfriesshire, Lord Advocate of Scotland, was born on 19th August 1560. He was educated at St Salvator's College, St Andrews, where George Buchanan was his tutor, and where he graduated M.A. in 1575. In 1577 Crichton left Scotland. He was for two years in France, where he seems to have served in the French army. There is no trustworthy evidence that he distinguished himself as a disputant at the university of Paris. In July 1579 he was at Genoa, and addressed the senate in a Latin oration, which was printed. Next year he reached Venice, and printed a Latin poem addressed to the scholar Aldus Manutius, grandson of the founder of the Aldine press. Aldus took the youth under his patronage, and issued a printed handbill announcing a great scholastic disputation in which Crichton was to take part. The young Scotchman was there described as a skilled athlete, scholar, poet, linguist, with unparalleled powers of memory. In 1581 (according to Aldus) Crichton went to Padua and overcame all the scholars there in public disputations. At the end of 1583 Aldus issued an edition of Cicero's De Universitate, dedicated to Crichton's memory, and asserted there that his versatile protégé died on 3d November 1583. No details are given, and although Aldus's date has been widely adopted, it is clearly an error. In 1584 Crichton visited Milan. There late in that year he published an elegy on the death of the archbishop, Cardinal Borromeo, and two gratulatory odes—one addressed to the cardinal's successor, Gasper Visconti, and the other to Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, on his marriage. Early next year (March 1585) he issued a collection of scattered Latin poems dedicated to the chief-magistrate of Milan. This is the latest date at which he is known to have been alive. In 1591 Crichton's younger brother Robert had become owner of his father's property in Scotland. Hence Crichton died between 1585 and 1591. In 1601 one Thomas Wright, in Passions of the Mind, related that when in Italy he heard that a young (unnamed) Scotchman, 'of most rare and singular parts,' was attacked by an (unspecified) Italian prince in disguise; that the prince, running some risk from the Scotchman's sword, announced his name; that the Scotchman, who was previously acquainted with the prince, handed him his sword, and the prince thereupon basely ran his opponent through the body. John Johnston, in Heroes Scoti (1603), states that Crichton was killed at Mantua by a son of the duke in a nocturnal brawl, and that he was buried at Mantua. Crichton's early 17th-century biographers combine Wright's and Johnston's stories, adding such doubtful details as that Crichton was tutor to his assailant, the Duke of Mantua's son, on the recommendation of Pope Clement VIII. Wright and Johnston were practically contemporaries of Crichton, and the outline of their story is doubtless true. But the fatal encounter at Mantua must be dated at least two years later than the date of Crichton's death supplied by Aldus. John Johnston in 1603 first used the epithet 'admirable' in describing Crichton ('omnibus in studiis admirabilis'), and it was again employed in David Leitch's Philosophia illacrymans (1637). But Crichton chiefly owes his popular reputation, as well as his designation of 'the Admirable,' to Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, who wrote an extravagantly fantastic account of the scholastic and athletic prowess which he displayed at Paris and Mantua in his Discovery of a most exquisite Jewel (1652). There is little that is historical in Urquhart's fables, although they have been largely accepted by later biographers, including P. F. Tytler, the first edition of whose biography of
Crichton appeared in 1819, and the second in 1825. Aldus's testimony to Crichton's versatility is alone worthy of serious consideration. Aldus was in the habit of praising extravagantly promising young strangers at the Italian universities, and ascribes to a Polish contemporary of Crichton, Stanislaus Niegoseuski, almost the identical accomplishments with which he credits Crichton. That Crichton's power of memory was extraordinary, is, however, independently corroborated by a physician of Treviso near Venice, named Bartolomeo Burchelati, in his Epitaphiorum Dialogi Septem (1583). And there is no reason to doubt his linguistic facility or his skill as a fencer. But the numerous Latin verses and prose essays which Crichton printed indicate no special capacity. Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel on Crichton's apocryphal career in 1837. For a critical and bibliographical account, see articles in Dictionary of National Biography, and in Gentleman's Magazine for March 1888 (both by Sidney L. Lee). A genealogical paper by John Stuart in Proceedings of Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1855), ii. 103-18, is also useful. Unique copies of most of Crichton's publications are in the Grenville Library of the British Museum.