"OF Paradise I cannot speak properly, for I was not there. It is far beyond, and I repent not going there; but I was not worthy." So wrote, more than five hundred years ago, an honest English knight who had spent some ten years journeying through that "most worthy land, most excellent and lady and sovereign of all other lands," which was "blessed and hallowed with the most precious body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ;" visiting portions of Africa and Asia; and picking up from all accessible sources legends and marvels, and scraps of the geography and history of distant countries. For something like two centuries the travels of Sir John Maundeville enjoyed a tremendous popularity; and though time can hardly be said to have improved the good gentleman's reputation for veracity and judgment, it has perhaps heightened rather than diminished the interest of his narrative. Alas! we can never know such travellers again. Men who go to Men who go to Palestine in a steamboat, and are whirled by locomotives into the very presence of the Sphinx, bring us back no wonderful stories of the mysterious East, with its dragons and enchanters, and its sacred places miraculously barred against profane footsteps. Travel has no mysteries now. What is the earthly paradise but a Turkish pashalic ? What is Prester John but a petty negro chieftain? And for dragons and chimæras dire, has not any good museum of natural history specimens of them all, nicely stuffed and labelled, or bottled in alcohol? In the days of Sir John, however, wonders were plenty; and if he did not see very many himself, he heard

of men who had seen no end of them, and he described them all the same. It was from hearsay, and not from personal observation, that he learned of the Lady of the Land, in the island of Cos, then called Lango. This wonderful lady was the daughter of Ypocras or Hippocrates, in form and likeness of a great dragon which is a hundred fathoms in length, "as they say," adds Sir John, "for I have not seen her." She lies in an old castle in a cave, appearing twice or thrice in a year, and condemned "by a goddess named Diana" to remain in that horrible shape until a knight shall come and kiss her on the mouth; then she shall resume her natural form, and the knight shall marry her and be lord of the isles. Many have tempted the adventure, but fled in affright when they have seen her. And every knight who once looks upon her and flees, must die anon.

At Ephesus the traveller beheld the tomb of St. John the Evangelist, and heard the familiar story that the apostle had entered the sepulchre alive, and was still living, in accordance with the saying of our Lord, "So I will have him to remain till I come, what is that to thee ?" "And men may see there the earth of the tomb many times openly stir and move, as though there were living things under." To say nothing else of this story, it is not fully consistent with Sir John's other statement, that the tomb contains nothing but manna, "which is called angels' meat," for the body was translated to paradise. Quite as great are the wonders of Joppa, "which is one of the oldest towns in the world; for it was founded before Noah's flood." Strange

ly confusing the legend of Perseus and Andromeda, our traveller relates that in a rock near Joppa may still be seen marks of the iron chains "wherewith Andromeda, a great giant, was bound and put in prison before Noah's flood; a rib of whose side, which is forty feet long, is still shown." Sir Sir John spent a long time in the service of the sultan of Egypt, where he seems to have anticipated modern researches into the source of the Nile; for he confidently assures us that it rises in the garden of Eden, and after descending upon earth, flows through many extensive countries under ground, coming out beneath a high hill called Alothe, between India and Ethiopia, and encircling the whole of Ethiopia and Mauritania, before it enters the land of Egypt. To the best of our belief, the travels of Dr. Livingstone have not fully confirmed this interesting geographical statement. The sultan dwells at a city called Babylon, which is not, however, the great Babylon where the diversity of languages was first made by the miracle of God. That Babylon is forty days' journey across the desert, in the territory of the king of Persia. The Tower of Babel was ten miles square, and included many mansions and dwellings; "but it is full long since any man dare approach to the tower, for it is all desert, and full of dragons and great serpents, and infested by divers venomous beasts." Sir John, therefore, is probably not responsible for the extraordinary measurement of its walls. Whether his account of the phoenix is based upon his personal observations, we are not told; but it is highly interesting. There is only one phoenix in the world. It is a very handsome and glorious bird, with a yellow neck, blue beak, purple wings, and a red and yellow tail, and may often be seen flying about the country. It lives five hundred years,

and at the end of that time comes to burn itself on the altar of the temple of Heliopolis, where the priests prepare for the occasion a fire of spices and sulphur. The next day they find in the ashes a worm. On the second day the worm becomes a live and perfect bird; and the third day it flies away. A plenty of fine things, indeed, Egypt could boast of in those days, far before any thing she has now. There were gardens bearing fruit seven times a year. There were the apples of paradise, which, cut them how you would, or as often as you would, always showed in the middle the figure of the holy cross. There was the apple-tree of Adam, whose fruit invariably had a mouthful bitten out of one side. There is a field containing seven wells, which the child Jesus made with one of his feet while at play with his companions. There are the granaries in which Joseph stored corn for the season of famine, (probably the Pyramids.) And passing out of Egypt across the desert of Arabia, Sir John tells of the wonderful monastery on Mount Sinai, whither the ravens, crows, and choughs and other fowls of that country, as sembling in great flocks, come every year on pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Catharine, each bringing a branch of bays or olive, so that from these offerings the monks have enough to keep themselves constantly supplied with oil. There are no such foul venomous beasts as flies, toads, lizards, lice, or fleas in this monastery; for once upon a time, when the vermin had become too thick there to be endured, the good brethren made preparations to move away, whereupon our Lady commanded them to remain and no pest of that sort should ever again come near them. On Mount Mamre, near Hebron, Sir John saw an oak-tree which had been standing since the creation

of the world. Oaks nowadays don't live to such a great age. This tree had borne no leaves since the crucifixion, (when all the trees in the world withered away,) but it had still so much virtue that a scrap of it healed the falling-sickness, and prevented founder in horses.

Armed with a letter under the sultan's great seal, Sir John went to Jerusalem, and was admitted to all the holy shrines from which Christians and Jews were usually excluded. He saw, or believed he saw, the spots sanctified by almost all the great events narrated in the Gospel; and though his credulity, as may be inferred from what we have already seen of his narrative, often got the better of his judgment, his piety, at any rate, deserves our genuine respect. We pass over his legends of this holy city, some of them poetical, some merely grotesque, and some really sanctioned by the general voice of the church, and go with him eastward to the valley of Jordan and the Dead Sea. Of this mysterious body of water he mentions that it casts out every day "a thing that is called asphalt in pieces as large as a horse," and neither man, nor beast, nor any thing that hath life may die in that sea, which hath been proved many times by the experiment of criminals condemned to death who have been left therein three or four days, and yet taken out alive. If any man cast iron therein, it will float; but a feather will sink to the bottom; "and these things," truly remarks Sir John, "are contrary to nature." Not more so, perhaps, than an incident of which he speaks at the city of Tiberias. In that city an unbeliever hurled a burning dart at our Lord, "and the head smote into the earth, and waxed green, and it grew to a great tree; and it grows still, and the bark thereof is all like coals." Then, near Damas

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cus there is a church, and behind the altar, in the wall, "a table of black wood on which was formerly painted an image of our Lady which turns into flesh; but now the image appears but little." As a compensation, however, for its loss, a certain wonderful oil, as Sir John assures us, drops continually from the wood and heals many kinds of sickness, and if any one keep it cleanly for a year, after that year it turns to flesh and blood. In this same region of marvels he tells us of a river which runs only on Saturday, and stands still all the rest of the week, and another which freezes wonderfully fast every night, and is clear of ice in the morning. These rivers are not known nowadays, or at any rate must have changed their habits.

After finishing the description of the Holy Land and Babylon, and reporting a conversation with the sultan, in which the vices of the Christians, such as drinking at taverns, and fighting, and perpetually changing the fashion of their clothes, were sharply satirized, and giving a synopsis of the Mohammedan creed, which we fear is not altogether authentic, our worthy traveller adds that now is the time, if it please us, to tell of the borders and isles, and divers beasts, and of various peoples beyond these borders. Accepting his invitation, we bear him company first to the land of Lybia, which must have been a most uncomfortable region in those days, for the sea there was higher than the land, and the sun was so hot that the waters were always boiling. Why the country was not, therefore, soused in a steaming, hissing flood, we do not know; Sir John himself evidently thinks it strange. In Little Ermony, which we take to be Armenia, he found something almost equally strange. That was the Castle of the Sparrow-hawk, where a sparrow-hawk

perpetually sat upon a fair perch and a fair lady of fairie guarded it. Whoever will watch the bird seven days and seven nights without company and without sleep, shall be granted by the fairy the first earthly wish that he shall wish; but if sleep overcome him, he will never more be seen of men. This, adds the careful traveller, hath been proved oftentimes, and he mentions several persons who performed the long task and got their wishes. Mount Ararat is another marvellous feature in this wonderful region; for it is seven miles high, and Noah's ark still rests upon it, and in clear weather may be seen afar off. Some men say that they have been up and touched the ark, and even put their fingers in the parts where the devil went out when Noah said "Benedicite," (unfortunately we do not know the legend to which this refers ;) but our traveller warns us not to believe such things, because they are not true! No man ever got up the mountain except one good monk; and he was miraculously favored, and brought down with him a plank which is still preserved in the monastery at the foot of the mountain. It is inexpressibly gratifying to observe that Sir John did not accept all the stories that were told him, but exercised a little judicious discrimination; and we shall therefore pay more respectful attention to the extraordinary things he tells us about the diamonds of India. They are found most commonly, he says, upon rocks of the sea, or else in connection with gold. They grow many together, male and female, and are nourished by the dew of heaven, so that they engender and bring forth small children that multiply and grow all the year.

"I have oftentimes tried the experiment," he continues, "that if a man keep them with a little of the rock, and wet them with May-dew often, they shall grow every

year, and the small will grow great. ... And a man should carry the diamond on his left side, for it is of greater virtue than on the right side; for the strength of their growing is toward the north, that is the left side of the world; and the left part of man is, when he turns his face toward the east." Sir John was not by any means singular in his views of the nature of diamonds in his day, however much he may be at variance with modern authorities; and he is only repeating a popular superstition of the middle ages when he ascribes many wonderful virtues to this gem, which he says preserves the wearer from poison, and wild beasts, and the assaults of enemies, and the machinations of enchanters, gives courage to the heart and strength to the limbs, heals lunatics, and casts out devils. But it loses its virtue by sin.

From stories of eels thirty feet long, and people of an evil color, green and yellow, and the well of Perpetual Youth, from which Sir John avers that he drank, and rats as great as dogs, which they take with huge mastiffs, because the cats feel unable to manage them, we pass to a passage of a very different kind, which, considering the time when it was written, is certainly curious. One hundred and seventy years before the time of Columbus we find Sir John Maundeville arguing that "the land and sea are of round shape, because the part of the firmament appears in one country which is not seen in another country," and predicting that "if a man found passages by ships, he might go by ship all round the world, above and be neath." A rather elaborate essay is devoted to an estimate of the size of the world, and to the story of an Englishman-name unknown-who sail ed around it once and never knew it; but coming to a country where the people spoke his own language,

was so much amazed that he turned around and sailed all the way back again. After this, Sir John gets back without unnecessary delay to the rosy realms of eastern fable.

We next find him in Java and among the isles of the Indian Ocean, where he tells us of rich kings, and splendid palaces where all the steps are of gold and silver alternately, and the walls covered with plates of precious metals, and halls and chambers paved with the same; of trees which bear meal, and honey, and wine, and deadly poison wherewith the Jews once tried to poison all Christendom; of snails so big that many persons may lodge in their shells; of men who feed upon serpents, so that they speak naught, but hiss as serpents do; of men and women who have dogs' heads; and of a mountain in the island of Silha where Adam and Eve went and cried for one hundred years after they were driven out of paradise -cried so hard that their tears formed a deep lake, which may be seen there to this day, if any body doubts the story. He tells of giants having only one eye, which is in the middle of the forehead; people of foul stature and cursed nature who have no heads, but their eyes are in their shoulders; people who have neither noses nor mouths; people who have mouths so big that when they sleep in the sun they cover the whole face with the upper lip; people who have ears hanging down to their knees; people who have horses' feet; and feathered men who leap from tree to tree. Passing to India and China, Sir John describes the fair and fruitful land of Albany, where there are no poor people, and the men are of very pale complextion and have only about fifty hairs in their beards. He speaks of having personally visited these regions; but we are sorry to say that his narrative is palpably borrowed in many places from

Pliny and Marco Polo. As the great town called Jamchay he seems to have found the prototype of Delmonico, and he gives an impressive account of the good custom that when a man will make a feast for his friends he goes to the host of a certain kind of inn, and says to him, "Array for me to-morrow a good dinner for so many people;" and says also, "Thus much will I spend, and no more." And Sir John adds, "Anon the host arrays for him, so fair, and so well, and so honestly that there shall lack nothing." Of the great Chan of Cathay, (Emperor of China,) and his wealth and magnificence, Sir John writes at considerable length, but with an evident expectation that men will not believe him. "My fellows and I," he says, "with our yeomen, served this emperor, and were his soldiers fifteen months against the King of Mancy, who was at war with him, because we had great desire to see his nobleness and the estate of his court, and all his government, to know if it were such as we heard say." How many his fellows were, or what route they followed in their eastern wanderings, we cannot tell. Sir John gives us no particulars; we only learn that he must have combined in curious perfection the characters of a pilgrim and a military adventurer; and how much of the world he saw, how much he described from hearsay, we can only determine from the internal evidence of his book. There is no reasonable doubt that he did spend some time in the dominions of the great chan; for his description of the country, the manners of the people, the magnificence of the sovereign. and the ceremonies of the court, though exaggerated sometimes to the heights of the grotesque, if not of the sublime, keeps near enough to the probable truth. We cannot say that we are glad of it; for Sir John is vast