Complete. From his “Prose Miscellanies.”

THERE can be no doubt of the fact that Lemuel Gulliver has, in modern days, enjoyed too exclusive a reputation as a fictionist. Munchausen has laurels which, though partly deserved, are somewhat too exuberant for his deserts. Congreve showed his knowledge of liars, when he made one of his dramatic characters say to another:—

	“Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee,
	Thou Liar of the first magnitude!”

  Pinto was great in his way, but he was a poor romancer compared with Sir John Mandeville. The elastic credulity of that gentleman could take in a mountain of mendacity. Marvels, that were such to others, were trifles to him; and with respect to the stories he heard in his travels, however gross they were, his great belief had stomach for them all. We design to rake up a few of his wonders, and, by comparing them with those of Pinto, prove conclusively that the latter is immeasurably distanced, as also are Rabelais, Munchausen, Gulliver, and indeed the whole olden tribe of pencilers by the wayside. We will begin with the Portuguese.

  His travels were of one and twenty years’ duration. They were made in the kingdoms of Ethiopia, China, Tartary, Cauchin-China, Calaminham, Siam, Pegu, Japan, and a great part of the East Indies. They were “done in English by H. C. Gent, printed by J. Macock,” and were “to be sold by Henry Herringman, at the sign of the Blew Anchor, in the Lower Walk of the London New Exchange,” in the year of grace 1663. Poor Pinto! He suffered much; and Cervantes has blackened his memory by calling him the Prince of Liars. Among the various sovereigns of the East with whom he sojourned, and in whose various battles he fought, he does certainly give accounts of violence, and misfortunes, and scenes of bloodshed that are somewhat enlarged; but he does not expect them, we imagine, to be believed. In his wanderings, he “five times suffered shipwrack, was sixteen times sold, and thirteen times made a slave.” He went first to the Indies, then to Ethiopia, thence to Turkey. Here he was purchased by a Greek (he was then a captive) and sold to a Jew. Then he was ransomed, and, passing to Goa, was received into the service of the king of Portugal. Here he is engaged in astonishing battles, sees the strangest sights, and does the daily labor of Hector. Here is one of his largest lies. “While coasting the ile of Sumatra,” he saith, “we entered a litel river, and saw athwart a wood such a many adders and crawling creatures, no less prodigious for their length than for the strangeness of their formes, that I shall not marvel if they that read this history will not believe my report of them.” With this preamble he emboldens himself to say: “Those of this country assured us that these creatures are so hardy as there be some of them will set upon an Armada, when there is not above four or five men in her, and overturn it with their tails, swallowing the men whole, without dismembering them!” Gathering confidence as he gets on, he observes:—

“In this place also we saw a strange kind of creatures which they call Caquisseitan; they are of the bigness of a great goose, very black and scaly on their backs, with a row of sharpe pricks on their chins, as long as a writing pen; moreover they have wings like unto bats, long necks, and a little bone growing on their necks resembling a cock’s spur, with a very long tail, spotted black and green, like unto the lizards of that country; these creatures hop and fly together like grass-hoppers; and in that manner they hunt apes, and such other beasts, whom they pursue even to the tops of the highest trees. Also we saw adders that were copped on the crowns of their heads, as big as a man’s thigh, and so venomous, as the negroes of that country informed us, that if any living thing came within the reach of their breath it died presently, there being no remedy nor antidote against it. We likewise saw others not copped on their crowns, nor so venomous as the former, but far greater and longer, with an head as big as a calf’s.”

  In the course of his wanderings, he somehow got into the service of the king of China, during which time the city of Nanquin was attempted to be taken by the king of Tartaria, but his army was sorely discomfited. Mark the result. “Now,” says Pinto, “after they had taken an account of all the dead, there appeared four hundred and fifty thousand, the most of whom died by sickness, as also an hundred thousand horses, and threescore thousand ‘rhinocerots,’ which were eaten in the space of two months and a half, wherein they wanted victual; so that of eighteen hundred thousand men, wherewith the king of Tartaria came to besiege Pequin, he carried home seven hundred and fifty thousand less than he brought.” From carrying on an armament against the king of Mattaban, Pinto becomes embassador to the court of Calaminham, whose extraordinary magnificence he especially describes, and thence sails down the great river Ritsey, whose banks, if we may believe him, are stocked with marvels. He makes particular mention of “certain tawny men, who are great archers, having their feet like oxen, but their hands are like unto other men, except that they are exceedingly hairy.” He saw, beside, “men named Magares, who feed on wild beasts, which they eat raw, such as serpents and adders; they hunt these wild beasts, mounted on certain animals as big as horses, which have three horns in the middle of their foreheads, with thick, short legs, and on the middle of their backs a row of prickles; all the rest of their body is like a great lizard; beside, they have on their necks instead of hair, other prickles, far longer and bigger than those on their backs; and on the joints of their shoulders short wings (the real hippogriff!) wherewith they fly, as it were—leaping the length of five or six and twenty paces at a grasp.”

  Let us now see how Sir John Mandeville bears away the palm in his Travels, “werein is sett down ye way to the Holie Lond, or Lond of Behest and Hieruzaleme; as also to the londs of the Great Caan, and of Prester John; to Indy and diverse other countries, with manie and straunge merveilles therein.” His tour was commenced in 1322, and ended in 1356, making thirty-four years’ absence from his native land. He went first to Egypt, and engaged in the service of the Sultan of that country, Melek Maderon. His religion at last induced him to leave that court for the Holy Land. Thence he went to Tartary, where, with four other knights, he was in the service of the Great Chan. His object of travel is thus expressed: “And for als moche as it is long tyme past that there was no general passage ne vyage over the see; and many men were desiren for to here speke of the Holy Lond, I, John Mandeville, knyght, that was born in Englond, in the town of Seynt Albones, albeit not worthi, passed the see in the yeere of our Lord Iesu Crist MCCCXXII., in the day of Seynt Michelle, and hidre to have ben long tyme over the see, and have seen and gone thorghe divers londs, and manie provinces and kingdomes, and iles, and have passed thorghe Tartarye, Lybye, Calde, and a gret partie of Ethiope; thorghe Amazoyne, Inde the less and the more, a gret partie, and thorgheout manie other iles that ben abouten Inde; where dwellen many divers folkes, and of divers manners and laws, and of divers schappes of men.”

  Mandeville seemed to labor under a kind of mental elephantiasis. Nothing was too large for his credit. In dragons and evil spirits, that carried on their ambulatory carnival on earth, and appeared constantly to the “stark staring eyes” of men, he had the fullest belief; in fact, if we may trust him, he met with them in great abundance, and saw their nests, as it were, where most they bred and haunted. “In Ethiope,” as we learn from him, “are such men that have but one foot, and they go so fast that it is a grete marvel; and that is a large foot, for the shadow thereof covereth the body from sun or rain when they lie on their backs.” In the island of Macameran, which is a “great ile and fair,” he says “the men and women have heads like hounds; they are reasonable, and worship an ox for their God; they are good men to fight, and bear a great target wherewith they cover all their body, and a spear in their hand.” The population in the island of Tarkonet, which he visited, receive this mention: “In this ile, all men are as beasts, and dwell in caves, not having wit to make houses. They eat adders, and speke not, but make such noises as the beasts do one to another.” He proceeds: “There is another ile called Dodyn, and in the same ile are many and divers sorts of men who have evil manners. The King of this ile is a great lord and mighty, and hath in many iles other kings under him; and in one of these iles are men that have but one eye, and that is in the midst of their front; which eat their flesh and fish all raw. And in another ile are men that have no heads, and their eyes are in their shoulders, and their mouths in their breasts!”

  This gives Mandeville our “suffrages” as a superior of Pinto. No doubt his work was familiar to Shakespeare, who unquestionably took from it the information which Othello conveyed to the grave and reverend seniors, in his great Defense, wherein he spoke

	——“Of antres vast and deserts idle,
	Of cannibals, that did each other eat,
	And of the Anthropophagi, men whose heads
	Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

  Mandeville continues: “And in another ile nigh by, are men that have ne head, ne eyen, and their mouth is in their shoulders! Another ile is there, where be men that have flat faces without nosen and without eyen, but they have two small holes in lew of eyen, and they have flatted nosen, withouten lippes. And also in that ile are men that have their faces all flat, without eyen, without mouth, and withouten nose, but they have their eyen and their mouth behind, on their shoulders!”

  The old knight was a perfect Yankee in inquisitiveness. These are his reasons for going to Tartary. We give them in his own quaint language: “And yee schalle undirstond that my fellowes and I with our zomen, we serveden this Emperour (of Tartary) and weren his soudyoures fifteen moneths agenst the kyng of Mancy, that held war agenst him. And the cause was, for we hadden grete lust for to see his noblesse, and the estat of his corte, and all his governance, to wyt gif it were soche as we herden say that it was.”

  He regretted, when at Jerusalem, in the Land of Behest, that he could not find many of the relics of our Savior’s crucifixion. He gives this account of some of them: “A part of the crown wherewithal our Lord was crowned, and eke one of the nales, and the speer’s hed, and manie other relicks, are in France and Paris, in the kyng’s chapelle. This crown was made of junks of the see; half whereof is at Paris, and the other at Constantinople; and the speer’s shafte the emperour of Almany hath. Likewise the emperour of Constantinople saith that he hath the speer’s head—and I have seen his.”

  It was a subject of great regret to our traveler, that he did not visit Paradise! a place which he approached “very nearly,” but concluded somehow not to enter. We wonder not at his scruples of unworthiness, after the large stories he had previously told. Yet, on reflection, we can hardly conceive that, after recording those stupendous narrations, he could shrink from any enterprise. But although he did not visit Paradise in propria persona, he leads us to infer that he met a great plenty of persons who had; and he offers us his information on the subject with an air of earnest confidence, as if he could not be gainsayed. He knew very well (if he disbelieved his own story, which is doubtful), that contradiction was almost impossible, since travel, in those days, was a matter of Herculean enterprise, seldom entered upon, save by Quixote’s errant, and wights of suspicious integrity of brain. Therefore he was at liberty to speak as he did of the place beloved by our first parents, and where often

	“Hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair
	That ever since in Love’s embraces met:
	Adam the goodliest man of men, since born
	His sons; the fairest of her daughters, Eve.”

He does not enter, like the sublime and imaginative Milton, upon a picture of the verdant coverts of laurel and myrtle, the bright acanthus, the roses, jessamines, crocus, and hyacinth, that “broidered with rich inlay” that holy ground; but he simply saith: “Of Paradys ne can I not speken properly,—for I was not there. It is far beyond, and that forthinketh me: also I was not worthi. This Paradys is enclosed all about with a wall, and men wyt not whereof it is made, for the walls beinge covered all over with mosse, as it seemeth: and that wall stretchethe fro the South unto the North, and it hath not but one entree, and that is closed with Fyre-brenning.” This idea of the burning fire at the gate of Paradise he derived without question from the early Scriptures, wherein is recorded the ejection of Adam and Eve from Eden, whom God sent forth to till the earth et collocavit angelum qui præferebat manu igneum gladium, ut custodiret aditum Paradisi. Indeed, the hints of many of his gratuities are drawn from the Sacred Writings, which are thus perverted and obscured to his reader.

  We have written enough, we think, to convince the most skeptical that Mandeville is a pre-eminent fabulist, worthy to stand like a Colossus among the great Fibbers of the Past. A closer comparison of his claims to distinction in this regard will add fresh leaves to his crown. We have not forgotten the Pantagruel and Gargantua of Rabelais; the tin horn and cherry tree of Munchausen; the Lilliputians that beset Gulliver, nor the extraordinary means which he subdued great conflagrations withal; but for “large discourse” in fiction, we prefer Mendez Pinto to all of them, and Mandeville to Pinto.