The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 | Page 4

V.C., C.S.I., Major-General KEYES, C.B., Dr. GEORGE BIRDWOOD, Mr. BURGESS, of Bombay, my old and valued friend Colonel W. H. GREATHED, C.B., and the Master of Mediaeval Geography, M. D'AVEZAC himself, with others besides, have kindly lent assistance of one kind or another, several of them spontaneously, and the rest in prompt answer to my requests.
Having always attached much importance to the matter of illustrations,[2] I feel greatly indebted to the liberal action of Mr. Murray in enabling me largely to increase their number in this edition. Though many are original, we have also borrowed a good many;[3] a proceeding which seems to me entirely unobjectionable when the engravings are truly illustrative of the text, and not hackneyed.
I regret the augmented bulk of the volumes. There has been some excision, but the additions visibly and palpably preponderate. The truth is that since the completion of the first edition, just four years ago, large additions have been made to the stock of our knowledge bearing on the subjects of this Book; and how these additions have continued to come in up to the last moment, may be seen in Appendix L,[4] which has had to undergo repeated interpolation after being put in type. KARAKORUM, for a brief space the seat of the widest empire the world has known, has been visited; the ruins of SHANG-TU, the "Xanadu of Cublay Khan," have been explored; PAMIR and TANGUT have been penetrated from side to side; the famous mountain Road of SHEN-SI has been traversed and described; the mysterious CAINDU has been unveiled; the publication of my lamented friend Lieutenant Garnier's great work on the French Exploration of Indo-China has provided a mass of illustration of that YUN-NAN for which but the other day Marco Polo was well-nigh the most recent authority. Nay, the last two years have thrown a promise of light even on what seemed the wildest of Marco's stories, and the bones of a veritable RUC from New Zealand lie on the table of Professor Owen's Cabinet!
M. VIVIEN de St. MARTIN, during the interval of which we have been speaking, has published a History of Geography. In treating of Marco Polo, he alludes to the first edition of this work, most evidently with no intention of disparagement, but speaks of it as merely a revision of Marsden's Book. The last thing I should allow myself to do would be to apply to a Geographer, whose works I hold in so much esteem, the disrespectful definition which the adage quoted in my former Preface[5] gives of the _vir qui docet quod non sapit_; but I feel bound to say that on this occasion M. Vivien de St. Martin has permitted himself to pronounce on a matter with which he had not made himself acquainted; for the perusal of the very first lines of the Preface (I will say nothing of the Book) would have shown him that such a notion was utterly unfounded.
In concluding these "forewords" I am probably taking leave of Marco Polo,[6] the companion of many pleasant and some laborious hours, whilst I have been contemplating with him ("_v?lti a levante_") that Orient in which I also had spent years not a few.
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And as the writer lingered over this conclusion, his thoughts wandered back in reverie to those many venerable libraries in which he had formerly made search for mediaeval copies of the Traveller's story; and it seemed to him as if he sate in a recess of one of these with a manuscript before him which had never till then been examined with any care, and which he found with delight to contain passages that appear in no version of the Book hitherto known. It was written in clear Gothic text, and in the Old French tongue of the early 14th century. Was it possible that he had lighted on the long-lost original of Ramusio's Version? No; it proved to be different. Instead of the tedious story of the northern wars, which occupies much of our Fourth Book, there were passages occurring in the later history of Ser Marco, some years after his release from the Genoese captivity. They appeared to contain strange anachronisms certainly; but we have often had occasion to remark on puzzles in the chronology of Marco's story![7] And in some respects they tended to justify our intimated suspicion that he was a man of deeper feelings and wider sympathies than the book of Rusticiano had allowed to appear.[8] Perhaps this time the Traveller had found an amanuensis whose faculties had not been stiffened by fifteen years of Malapaga?[9] One of the most important passages ran thus:--
"Bien est voirs que, après ce que Messires Marc Pol avoit pris fame et si estoit demouré plusours ans de sa vie a _Venysse_, il avint