I will give some particulars regarding a very curious one, containing a version in the Irish language.

Notice of a curious Irish Version of

This remarkable document is found in the Book of Lismore, belonging to the Duke of Devonshire. Polo. That magnificent book, finely written on vellum of the largest size, was discovered in 1814, enclosed in a wooden box, along with a superb crozier, on opening a closed doorway in the castle of Lismore. It contained Lives of the Saints, the (Romance) History of Charlemagne, the History of the Lombards, histories and tales of Irish wars, &c. &c., and among the other matter this version of Marco Polo. A full account of the Book and its mutilations will be found in O'Curry's Lectures on the MS. Materials of Irish History, pp. 196 seqq. The Book of Lismore was written about 1460 for Finghin MacCarthy and his wife Catharine Fitzgerald, daughter of Gerald, Eighth Earl of Desmond.

The date of the Translation of Polo is not known, but it may be supposed to have been executed about the above date, probably in the Monastery of Lismore (county Waterford).

in 1870 to examine the MS. throughout, and, though I could give little time to it, the result was very curious.

I find that this MS. contains, not one only, but at least seven of the passages otherwise peculiar to Ramusio, and must have been one of the elements that went to the formation of his text. Yet of his more important interpolations, such as the chapter on Ahmad's oppressions and the additional matter on the City of Kinsay, there is no indication. The seven passages alluded to are as follows; the words corresponding to Ramusian peculiarities are in italics, the references are to my own volumes.

I. In the chapter on Georgia :

"Mare quod dicitur Gheluchelan vel ABACU"

"Est ejus stricta via et dubia. Ab una parte est mare quod dixi de ABACU et ab aliâ nemora invia," &c. (See I. p. 61, note 8.)

2. "Et ibi optimi austures dicti AVIGI” (I. 52).

3. After the chapter on Mosul is another short chapter, already alluded to:

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Prope hanc civitatem (est) alia provincia dicta MUS & MEREDIEN in quâ nascitur magna quantitas bombacis, et hic fiunt bocharini et alia multa, et sunt mercatores homines et artiste." (See I. p. 62.)

4. In the chapter on Tarcan (for Carcan, i.e., Yarkand) :

"Et maior pars horum habent unum ex pedibus grossum et habent gosum in gula; et est hic fertilis contracta." (See I. p. 195.)

5. In the Desert of Lop:

"Homines trasseuntes appendunt bestiis suis capanullas [i.e. campanellas] ut ipsas senciant et ne deviare possint" (I. p. 203).

6. " Ciagannor, quod sonat in Latino STAGNUM ALBUM” (I. p. 286).

7. "Et in medio hujus viridarii est palacium sive logia, tota super columpnas. Et in summitate cujuslibet columnæ est draco magnus circundans totam columpnam, et hic substinet eorum cohoperturam cum ore et pedibus; et est cohopertura tota de cannis hoc modo," &c. (See I. p. 290.)

From the extracts that have been translated for me, it is obvious that the version was made, with an astounding freedom certainly, from Friar Francesco Pipino's Latin.

Both beginning and end are missing. But what remains opens thus; compare it with Friar Pipino's real prologue as we give it in the Appendix!*

“ riguib & daissch na cathsî ñ. bai btą rigui anaibit san fnses iñ cathr mtanñ . ba eoluċ dā iŕ nahilberlaib franysc) aaīm. bur jaří du ambat na maite ucut &cumġit få mleabo2 doclod fcula o&lngaid natątairld cg int[ng laitanda.” &c.

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Kings and chieftains of that city. There was then in the city a princely Friar in the habit of St. Francis, named Franciscus, who was versed in many languages. He was brought to the place where those nobles were, and they requested of him to translate the book from the Tartar (!) into the Latin language. 'It is an abomination to me,' said he, 'to devote my mind or labour to works of Idolatry and Irreligion.' They entreated him again. It shall be done,' said he; 'for though it be an irreligious narrative that is related therein, yet the things are miracles of the True God; and every one who hears this much against the Holy Faith shall pray fervently for their conversion. And he who will not pray shall waste the vigour of his body to convert them.' I am not in dread of this Book of Marcus, for there is no lie in it. My eyes beheld him bringing the relics of the holy Church with him, and he left [his testimony], whilst tasting of death, that it was true. And Marcus was a devout man. What is there in it, then, but that Franciscus translated this Book of Marcus from the Tartar into Latin; and the years of the Lord at that time were fifteen years, two score, two hundred, and one thousand" (1255).

It then describes Armein Bec (Little Armenia), Armein Mor (Great Armenia), Musul, Taurisius, Persida, Camandi, and so forth. The last chapter is that on Abaschia :—

"ABASCHIA also is an extensive country, under the government of Seven Kings, four of whom worship the true God, and each of them wears a golden cross on the forehead; and they are valiant in battle, having been brought up fighting against the Gentiles of the other three kings, who are Unbelievers and Idolaters. And the kingdom of ADEN; a Soudan rules over them.

"The king of Abaschia once took a notion to make a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre of Jesus. 'Not at all,' said his nobles and warriors to him, 'for we should be afraid lest the infidels through whose territories you

*My valued friend Sir Arthur Phayre made known to me the passage in O'Curry's Lectures. I then procured the extracts and further particulars from Mr. J. Long, Irish Transcriber and Translator in Dublin, who took them from the Transcript of the Book of Lismore, in the possession of the Royal Irish Academy.

would have to pass, should kill you. There is a Holy Bishop with you,' said they; 'send him to the Sepulchre of Jesus, and much gold with him'"

The rest is wanting.

XI. SOME ESTIMATE OF THE CHARACTER OF POLO AND HIS BOOK. AND

Grounds of Polo's preeminence

medieval

66. That Marco Polo has been so universally recognized as the King of Medieval Travellers is due rather to the width of his experience, the vast compass of his journeys, and the romantic nature of his personal history, than among to transcendent superiority of character or capacity. travellers. The generation immediately preceding his own has bequeathed to us, in the Report of the Franciscan Friar William de Rubruquis, on the Mission w which St. Lewis charged him to the Tartar Courts, the narrative of one great journey, which, in its rich detail, its vivid pictures, its acuteness of observation and strong good sense, seems to me to form a Book of Travels of much higher claims than any one series of Polo's chapters; a book, indeed, which has never had justice done to it, for it has few superiors in the whole Library of Travel.

Enthusiastic Biographers, beginning with Ramusio, have placed Polo on the same platform with Columbus. But where has our Venetian Traveller left behind him any trace of the genius and lofty enthusiasm, the ardent and justified previsions which mark the great Admiral as one of the lights of the human race?† It is a juster praise that the spur which

M. D'Avezac has refuted the common position that this admirable traveller was a native of Brabant. (See Appendix L, in Vol. II.)

That cross-grained Orientalist, I. J. Schmidt, on several occasions speaks contemptuously of this veracious and delightful traveller, whose evidence goes in the teeth of some of his crotchets. But I am glad to find that Professor Peschel takes a view similar to that expressed in the text: "The narrative of Ruysbroek [Rubruquis], almost immaculate in its freedom from fabulous insertions, may be indicated on account of its truth to nature as the greatest geographical masterpiece of the Middle Ages" (Gesch. der Erdkunde, 1865, p. 151).

High as Marco's name deserves to be set, his place is not beside the writer of such burning words as these addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella: "From the most tender age I went to sea, and to this day I have continued to do so. Whosoever devotes himself to this craft must desire to know the secrets of Nature here below. For 40 years now have I thus been engaged, and wherever man has sailed

his Book eventually gave to geographical studies, and the beacons which it hung out at the Eastern extremities of the Earth helped to guide the aims, though scarcely to kindle the fire, of the greater son of the rival Republic. His work was at least a link in the Providential chain which at last dragged the New World to light. *

67. Surely Marco's real, indisputable, and, in their kind, unique claims to glory may suffice! He was the first Tra- • veller to trace a route across the whole longitude His true of ASIA, naming and describing kingdom after king- glory.

claims to

hitherto on the face of the sea, thither have I sailed also. I have been in constant relation with men of learning, whether ecclesiastic or secular, Latins and Greeks, Jews and Moors, and men of many a sect besides. To accomplish this my longing (to know the Secrets of the World) I found the Lord favourable to my purposes; it is He who hath given me the needful disposition and understanding. He bestowed upon me abundantly the knowledge of seamanship: and of Astronomy he gave me enough to work withal, and so with Geometry and Arithmetic. . . . In the days of my youth I studied works of all kinds, history, chronicles, philosophy, and other arts, and to apprehend these the Lord opened my understanding. Under His manifest guidance I navigated hence to the Indies; for it was the Lord who gave me the will to accomplish that task, and it was in the ardour of that will that I came before your Highnesses. All those who heard of my project scouted and derided it; all the acquirements I have mentioned stood me in no stead; and if in your Highnesses, and in you alone, Faith and Constancy endured, to Whom are due the Lights that have enlightened you as well as me, but to the Holy Spirit?" (Quoted in Humboldt's Examen Critique, I. 17, 18.)

M. Libri however speaks too strongly when he says: "The finest of all the results due to the influence of Marco Polo is that of having stirred Columbus to the discovery of the New World. Columbus, jealous of Polo's laurels, spent his life in preparing means to get to that Zipangu of which the Venetian traveller had told such great things; his desire was to reach China by sailing westward, and in his way he fell in with America." (H. des Sciences Mathém, &c. II. 150.) The fact seems to be that Columbus knew of Polo's revelations only at second hand, from the letters of the Florentine Paolo Toscanelli and the like; and I cannot find that he ever refers to Polo by name. Though to the day of his death he was full of imaginations about Zipangu and the land of the Great Kaan as being in immediate proximity to his discoveries, these were but accidents of his great theory. It was the intense conviction he had acquired of the absolute smallness of the Earth, of the vast extension of Asia eastward, and of the consequent narrowness of the Western Ocean, on which his life's project was based. This conviction he seems to have derived chiefly from the works of the Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly. But the latter borrowed his collected arguments from Roger Bacon, who has stated them, erroneous as they are, very forcibly in his Opus Majus (p. 137), as Humboldt has noticed in his Examen (vol. i. p. 64). The Spanish historian Mariana makes a strange jumble of the alleged guides of Columbus, saying that some ascribed his convictions to "the information given by one Marco Polo, a Florentine physician!" (“como otros dizen, por aviso que le dio un cierto Marco Polo, Medico Florentin" Hist. de España, lib. xxvi. cap. 3). Toscanelli is called by Columbus Maestro Paulo, which seems to have led to this mistake; see Sign. G. Uzielli, in Boll. della Soc. Geog. Ital. IX. p. 119.

dom which he had seen with his own eyes; the Deserts of PERSIA, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of BADAKHSHAN, the jade-bearing rivers of KHOTAN, the MONGOLIAN Steppes, cradle of the power that had so lately threatened to swallow up Christendom, the new and brilliant Court that had been established at CAMBALUC: The first Traveller to reveal CHINA in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities, its rich manufactures, its swarming population, the inconceivably vast fleets that quickened its seas and its inland waters; to tell us of the nations on its borders with all their eccentricities of manners and worship; of TIBET with its sordid devotees; of BURMA with its golden pagodas and their tinkling crowns; of LAOS, of SIAM, of COCHIN CHINA, of JAPAN, the Eastern Thule, with its rosy pearls and golden-roofed palaces; the first to speak of that Museum of Beauty and Wonder, still so imperfectly ransacked, the INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO, source of those aromatics then so highly prized and whose origin was so dark; of JAVA the Pearl of Islands; of SUMATRA with its many kings, its strange costly products, and its cannibal races; of the naked savages of NICOBAR and ANDAMAN; of CEYLON the Isle of Gems with its Sacred Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of INDIA THE GREAT, not as a dream-land of Alexandrian fables but as a country seen and partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds and the strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl, and its powerful sun; the first in medieval times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian Empire of ABYSSINIA, and the semi-Christian Island of SoCOTRA; to speak, though indeed dimly, of ZANGIBAR with its negroes and its ivory, and of the vast and distant MADAGASCAR, bordering on the Dark Ocean of the South, with its Ruc and other monstrosities; and, in a remotely opposite region, of SIBERIA and the ARCTIC OCEAN, of dog-sledges, white bears, and reindeer-riding Tunguses.

That all this rich catalogue of discoveries should belong to the revelations of one Man and one Book is surely ample ground enough to account for and to justify the Author's high place in the roll of Fame, and there can be no need to exaggerate his greatness, or to invest him with imaginary

attributes.*

*"C'est diminuer l'expression d'un éloge que de l'exagérer" (Humboldt, Examen, III. 13).