laid to catch the unwary reader's credulity, and keeps up a pretence of honesty and good faith. Lucian's creative power is a poet's; d'Outremeuse's insinuating tricks are those of a humorist.

The 14th century had no need to go to classical antiquity for examples of traveller's tales, true or false. Pilgrimages and Crusades had given birth to many narratives of adventure and exploration, which had been parodied in accounts of the land called by a later preacher 'the promised land of ridicule and fable,' viz. the land of Cockayne. In the French Fabliau de Coquaigne,' written in the 13th century, the author gravely states that he was sent thither by the Pope in expiation of his sins. The pleasures he describes are of the most simple and childish kind; perpetual feasting and self-indulgence fill the time, and money and clothing are to be had for nothing, as well as wine, roast venison, and cakes. To these a slightly Oriental flavour is added in the Middle English poem of the land of Cockayne, by the enumeration of Eastern spices and precious stones, whose appeal to the senses is somewhat less brutal, while all the animal childishness of the French fabliau is retained. By placing a nunnery and an abbey of monks in the land of sensuality, the English poem also admits an allusion to Church people which might originally be a harmless joke, but which to the lay mind of later days appears more or less satirical.

If we were to dwell too much on such parodies of ilgrims' tales, we should not approach Mandeville in ae right spirit, for his compilation is mainly from truthful books, and contains many sober statements of fact. While not devoid of ludicrous touches, it must be called fanciful rather than comical, and is more nearly related to the romances than to the fabliaux. Most of its Eastern colouring is derived from the body of legends which gathered round the history of Alexander the Great in early crusading times. The Crusaders found a pre-figuration of their own aims of conquest in the book of Daniel, eked out by the account in Josephus of Alexander's respectful visit to Jerusalem, and of his sacrifice in the Temple. They conceived him to have been, under the Old Law, the conqueror of Asia and the protector of the Holy Land that many a Christian prince

dreamt of becoming under the New Law. They glorified him with the nimbus of natural philosophy and of geographical discovery, as became the pupil of Aristotle and the explorer of mysterious India. They traced his footsteps among monstrous beings of human or animal shape cynocephali and hippopotami, pygmies and chameleons. They even imagined him soaring up into the air in a box carried by griffins, and diving to the bottom of the sea in a glass case. Besides the wonders of nature, they brought him into touch with the extreme types of human societies and modes of thought. The world-conqueror, whose greed and curiosity knew no bounds, was made to argue with the Bragmans (Brahmins) who professed to despise wealth and even comfort. In this way, the enterprising and worldly warrior's love of adventure was contrasted with the self-denying, contemplative spirit of Eastern ascetics. The epic cycle of Alexander was therefore equally stimulating to mere lovers of the wonderful and to more thoughtful readers, and provided both entertainment and what passed in the Middle Ages for information.

The learned commentators of Mandeville mostly quote a Latin version of the Alexander story, commonly called 'Historia de Proliis,' as the book drawn upon for quaint and fantastic geographical lore. But it is highly probable that d'Outremeuse enjoyed versions in French rhyme, as well as imitations in which incidents are transferred from the Alexandrian to the Crusading romances, and is indebted to them for the general atmosphere of his book and for curious details, which he blended with materials borrowed from Latin works of scientific pretensions. Moreover, like many writers who collect and impart knowledge at second-hand, he made use of an encyclopædia; his main source is the repository of learning put together under the protection of St Louis, King of France, by the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais. Much history, geography and natural science d'Outremeuse conveyed from it with nearly literal faithfulness.

As for the route which he pretends to have followed, it is taken from two genuine books of travel-William of Boldensele's narrative of his pilgrimage to Palestine and Egypt, and Odoric de Pordenone's account of his religious and diplomatic mission to the Far East. William

was a German gentleman who at one time belonged to the order of St Dominic; he started for the Near East about 1332 and wrote a sober and truthful account of his experiences on his return in 1336. Odoric was a Franciscan friar born in Friuli, who was sent out to India and China about 1316-1318. His travels lasted some ten years, and were written down in 1330. Covering a vast expanse of unknown regions, they are less precise and matter of fact than the German's description of familiar Palestine. In the choice of these sources the author of Mandeville' showed excellent judgment; each of them makes good reading, has been found perfectly honest by modern geographers, and was fairly recent and up to date in d'Outremeuse's time.

The fictitious date of Sir John's departure is laid in 1322, between William's and Odoric's; that of the knight's return, some twenty years after theirs, viz. in 1356. As his book hardly dates much further back than 1370, it is about thirty years later than the accounts from which its framework is drawn. Not only does d'Outremeuse enumerate cities and kingdoms in the same order as do his two predecessors, but he boldly appropriates page after page from them and repeats most of their facts, while subtly colouring the atmosphere in which they are presented. A dry and uninspiring truth, put down by William in plain medieval Latin, is in his follower's rhythmical French prose expanded into a vague exaggeration, which seems to suggest more than it contains.

A single example may help us to realise that difference in attitude between our romancer of Liége and the German eye-witness whom he follows:

'About Calvary (writes the Dominican in his description of Jerusalem) are some marble columns which constantly drop water; and the ignorant people say that they weep and mourn Christ's death. This is untrue, for a fact due to nature need not be explained as a miracle. Now there is a species of stone not unlike marble, called enydros, whose nature, as books of mineralogy tell us, is such, that it condenses the surrounding air into water through the extreme coldness of its own complexion.'

* Die Edelherren von Boldensele oder Boldensen.' Von E. L. Grotefend. Hannover: Jänecke, 1855, pp. 60, 61.

He then proceeds to quote an Aristotelian formula to account for the well-known phenomenon of moisture oozing out of stone, and thus interprets it according to the scientific theories of his time.

'When I was in Constantinople (he continues), I saw in the basement of the old Imperial Palace some marble vessels of similar stone, which fill themselves with water and are regularly emptied; when a year is over, they are found full of water again without the help of any human agency, so that they run over on every side, and this passes for a miracle with the vulgar. When I saw them, I examined the composition of the stone and the surroundings, and explained the natural cause of the fact to the Emperor's officer. He was very pleased, and thenceforth showed me much friendship and attention.'

*

On reading this, d'Outremeuse saw that the German had missed an opportunity to surprise and please his readers, and remembered the weeping and sweating statues of gods in the Alexandrian romances. He therefore removed the prosaic scientific explanation and wrote of Calvary :

And there beside be four pillars of stone, that always drop water; and some men say that they weep for Our Lord's death.'†

As for the vessels of Constantinople introduced by Boldensele as an illustration, he describes them as if he had himself seen them:

'And there is the vessel of stone as it were of marble, that men clepe enydros, that evermore droppeth water, and filleth himself every year, till that it go over above, without that that men take from within.' ‡

In this way what was to Boldensele a curious natural phenomenon is now brought into line with various marvels shown to pilgrims, with blood-drops appearing as stains in white rock, with white milk-marks on red stone, with miraculous oil oozing from the bones of a saint or from a picture of the Virgin. Only the author

Ibid., p. 61. + Pollard's Edition, p. 52.

Ibid., p. 12.

of Mandeville' shows as little reverence for the miracles approved by the Church as for the pronouncements of Aristotle. All he wants is amusement for himself and for his readers. Of such a venerable relic as the head of St John the Baptist he reports with cheerful inconsistency that the whole or parts of it may be in Constantinople, or in Rome, or in Genoa, or in Amiens; and he archly concludes 'I wot never, but God knoweth; but in what wise that men worship it, the blessed St John holds him a-paid.'

To such a light-hearted compiler the Holy Land appealed as the scene of many wonderful stories from the time of the Patriarchs down to that of the Crusaders; and he is more concerned to entertain than to edify his readers when he enumerates the towns, hills and rivers associated with the lives of Our Lord and of the saints. Therefore he is not inspired by Jerusalem, which he could not well adorn with inventions of his own, and he is at his best when roaming through the hazy boundaries of the realms of fable. Therefore also the Far East, where he can give full play to his imagination, shows his quaint fancy and his inventive genius at its best.

From the prosaic itinerary of Boldensele these poetical gifts could derive no direct stimulus, but they were in unison with a writer of crusading literature, the FrancoBelgian Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, who lived about a century and a half before d'Outremeuse. As part of Jacques' life was spent in a religious community which flourished in Oignies (now in the Belgian province of Namur), his works must have been easily accessible in the diocese of Liége. A divine with a leaning towards mysticism and an inspiring preacher, he had the power of stirring his fellow-men to emotion and action. One critic passes sentence upon him as a vain, conceited rhetorician, untrustworthy, because always striving after effect. Another admits that his Oriental history would shrink to half its length if shorn of its padding and repetitions. These censures, which apply still more to Mandeville, disclose the mental kinship between the two men. The Oriental History, from which much of the legendary and curious matter contained in the Travels

* Pollard's Edition, p. 72.