The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal

HE publication of Colonel Yule's Marco Polo' is an epoch in geographical literature. Never before, perhaps, did a book of travels appear under such exceptionally favourable auspices; an editor of a fine taste and ripe experience, and possessed with a passion for curious medieval research, having found a publisher willing to gratify that passion without stint on the score of expenditure; and the result being the production of a work which, in so far as it combines beauty of typography and wealth of illustration with a rich variety of recondite learning, may be regarded as a phenomenon in these days. of thrifty and remunerative book-making. Nor is it a slight praise thus to pronounce Colonel Yule's edition to be a great success; for never, perhaps, has there been a more difficult book of the class to expound than Marco Polo's travels, since his great prototype, Herodotus, recited his history at Athens. Every page is a puzzle; every chapter contains strange names which it is hard to recognise, strange stories which it is harder still either to believe or to explain. And, indeed, when we remember Marco Polo's personal character, and the peculiar circumstances under which his very extraordinary experiences were reduced to writing, our wonder must be, not that there is so much requiring illustration in this account of his Eastern travels, but rather that the narrative should be in any degree intelligible and especially that a commentator should have been found with the knowledge, the ingenuity, and the perse

VOL. CXXXV. NO. CCLXXV.

verance requisite to place the book in a really attractive form before the reading public of the nineteenth century.

The attempt has often been made before to bring Marco Polo into notice. According to a list, indeed, compiled by Colonel Yule, and given in the appendix to his work, twentyseven different editions of these travels have been published in various European languages during the last four centuries; and although the majority of such editions have been mere reproductions or translations of a faulty text without any serious effort at emendation or explanation, still in some instances-as in the Italian editions of Baldello-Boni, of Lazari, and of Adolfo Bartoli-sound and able criticism has been exerted, by which Colonel Yule has duly profited; and moreover, in two particular instances-the English edition of Marsden, published in 1818, and the French edition of Pauthier, published in 1865-illustration has been added of a comprehensive, if not a very scholarly, character. Marsden's edition of Marco Polo,' an honest and unpretentious work, represents the knowledge, or rather the want of knowledge, of Sixty • Years since.' Pauthier's edition, with very much more of pretension, is hardly an improvement on Marsden in regard to the historical or geographical illustration of Western and Central Asia; though it must be admitted that his Chinese learning stands him in good stead, and has enabled him to furnish many valuable extracts from original sources, relating to Eastern Asia, in support or explanation of Marco Polo's own notices. At any rate, we think the general impression will be, on comparing the baldness and inaccuracy of previous editors with the stores of solid, as well as curious, information poured forth by Colonel Yule with an unsparing hand, that the edition we are now considering was imperatively called for.

The story of Marco Polo's book is told with much liveliness and effect in Colonel Yule's introduction. This introduction, indeed, which extends to 160 pages, and is of a very miscellaneous character, forms, we think, in a literary point of view, the most important, as it certainly forms the most interesting, portion of Colonel Yule's two portly volumes. Besides ample dissertations on such general topics as the state of the East in the thirteenth century, the jealousies and wars of Genoa and Venice, a digression on the war-galleys of the Middle Ages, &c. &c., it comprises all that can be recovered of the personal history of the Polo family, of the individual travellers, of their appearance, their character, and their objects; their singular reception at Venice on their return from the East after twentyfour years' absence, which reads, as has been said, like a

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The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal, Bind 135