BOOKS.
MARCO POLO.*
IT is superfluous at this date to praise Sir Henry Yule's edition of Marco Polo. English scholarship can scarcely boast a greater masterpiece, and the part played in this third edition by M. Cordier is a tribute at once to Sir Henry's thoroughness and to his colleague's loyalty. When, some years since, Professor Bury edited Gibbon's Decline and Fall, he paid that eminent historian the high compliment of adding little and changing less. So, though M. Cordier has revised Sir Henry Yule's Marco Polo in the light of recent discoveries, he has found very little to modify in his predecessor's conclusions ; and while he has neglected no sources of information, he has not added a great deal to a very full commentary. But the book as it stands is a monument of scholarship, well edited, admirably illustrated, and equipped with such maps as will create for it a universal and permanent value. Nor should we overlook Miss Yule's biography of her father, a model of its kind, the quiet, restrained, and adequate record of a brave soldier and fine scholar.
The story of Marco Polo has often been told. He was one of the earliest travellers to the East, and he still keeps his place among the most accurate. How he came to visit the East he thus explains. In the year of Christ, 1260, Nicolas Polo, the father of Marco, and his brother Maffei) crossed the sea on a venture of trade from Constantinople, whither they had carried their merchant's wares. For a year they lived at the Court of a Tartar Prince, Berea Khan by name, and presently they arrived at the Court of the Great Khan, the celebrated Kublai, who, having detained them for a while, sent them as his envoys to the Pope. But when they came to Italy, they found that Clement IV. was dead, and they paid their respects to the new Pope, Gregory X., at Acre, whence, accompanied by Marco, and fortified with authority and credentials, they returned to the Court of the Great Khan. Here Marco speedily gained the Khan's protection. He " sped wondrously in learning the customs of the Tartars," he says himself, "as well as their language, their manner of writing, and their practice of war ; in fact, he came in brief space to know several languages, and four sundry written characters." So greatly did the Emperor esteem him that he sent him on an Embassy to a country which was a good six months' journey distant. And the young Venetian, not con- tent to execute his master's bidding, brought him back news of the strange countries through which he passed, and the strange peoples that he saw. Thus Marco Polo grew in the favour of the Khan, who said, like a true prophet : " If this young man live, he will assuredly come to be a person of great worth and ability." So highly indeed did the Khan value the services of the three Venetians, that they had the greatest difficulty in leaving his Court, and had not the oppor- tunity offered of escorting the Lady Kokichin to Tabriz,
• The Book of Ser Marco Polo. Translated and Edited, with Notes, by Colonel Sir Henry Yule. Third Edition, Revised throughout in the light of recent discoveries by Henri Cordier. With a Memoir of Henry Yule by his Daughter. 2 vols. London : J. Murray. [a 3s.] they might never again have visited their native Venice.
Fortunately for us, they escaped from their golden captivity laden with jewels, and reached home, after a voyage of three
years, in 1295. Marco Polo did not long enjoy his well-earned leisure. In 1298 he sailed under Dandolo's command as supra- comito, or gentleman commander of a galley, against the Genoese. After a hardly contested battle, the Genoese were completely victorious, and Marco Polo was one of seven
thousand prisoners carried in chains to Genoa. His im- prisonment had one happy result : he beguiled the time by dictating to a fellow-captive, Rusticiano of Pisa, the book of travels that we know. First written in a rough-and-ready French, as Sir Henry Yule plainly shows, the travels were translated into other tongues, and won a popularity which has never waned. Strangely enough, Marco Polo soon became a
legend. His book was deemed no more trustworthy than the Thousand and One Nights. "It is alleged," says Sir Henry
Yule, "that long after our traveller's death, there was always in the Venetian Masques one individual who assumed the name of Marco Milioni, and told Munchausen-like stories to divert the vulgar. Such, if this be true, was the honour of our prophet among the populace of his own country."
And the honour, or dishonour, was wholly undeserved, for the shining merit of Marco Polo is his astounding, invariable veracity. He was no vain repeater of travellers' tales. The very stories which appeared the wildest fictions to his ignorant contemporaries have been verified by the patient research of modern scholars. Though he was a merchant untrained even in the science of his own time, though his reading seems to have been limited to the popular romances of Alexander, he had a rare and consummate talent for accurate observation. His astounding memory was able to reproduce after the lapse of six years all that he had seen and heard in his wonderful travels. The hero of his book is Kublai Khan, the only begetter of Coleridge's splendid fragment. Indeed, the description of the stately pleasure dome is the one page of enthusiasm which distinguishes Messer Marco's otherwise sober narrative. But, like Ulysses, he visited many lands and many peoples, and he noted all that he saw with a justice and circumstance which are alike remarkable. His achievement is so admirably summed up by Sir Henry Yule that we had best give it in his own eloquent words :—
" He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia, naming and describing Kingdom after King- dom which he had seen with his own eyes ; the Deserts of Persia, the flowering plateaus 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 %em- balm : 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 Thibet with its sordid devotees ; of Burmah 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, the Indian archipelago, still so imperfectly ransacked ; 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, and 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 Brahmins, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds and the strange tales of their acquisition, its seed-beds of pearl, and its powerful sun ; the first in mediaeval 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 Zanzibar with its negroes and its ivory, and of the vast and distant Madagascar, bordering on the Dark Ocean of the South, with its rue and other monstrosities, and, in a remotely opposite region, of Siberia and the Arctio Ocean, of dog sledges, white bears, and reindeer riding Tunguses."
Truly a noble achievement nobly celebrated, and it is pleasant to think that Sir Henry Yule in building a monument to Marco Polo built a monument, imperishable also, to himself.
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