be doubted if it would have continued to exercise such fascination on
many minds through successive generations were it not for the difficult
questions which it suggests. It is a great book of puzzles, whilst our
confidence in the man’s veracity is such that we feel certain every
puzzle has a solution.
And such difficulties have not attached merely to the identification
of places, the interpretation of outlandish terms, or the illustration
of obscure customs; for strange entanglements have perplexed also the
chief circumstances of the Traveller’s life and authorship. The time
of the dictation of his Book and of the execution of his Last Will
have been almost the only undisputed epochs in his biography. The year
of his birth has been contested, and the date of his death has not
been recorded; the critical occasion of his capture by the Genoese, to
which we seem to owe the happy fact that he did not go down mute to
the tomb of his fathers, has been made the subject of chronological
difficulties; there are in the various texts of his story variations
hard to account for; the very tongue in which it was written down
has furnished a question, solved only in our own age, and in a most
unexpected manner.
[Sidenote: Ramusio, his earliest biographer. His account of Polo.]