any of those hitherto spoken of, and the history and true character
of which are involved in a cloud of difficulty. We mean that Italian
version prepared for the press by G. B. Ramusio, with most interesting,
though, as we have seen, not always accurate preliminary dissertations,
and published at Venice two years after his death, in the second volume
of the _Navigationi e Viaggi_.[13]
The peculiarities of this version are very remarkable. Ramusio seems
to imply that he used as one basis at least the Latin of Pipino; and
many circumstances, such as the division into Books, the absence of
the terminal historical chapters and of those about the Magi, and
the form of many proper names, confirm this. But also many additional
circumstances and anecdotes are introduced, many of the names assume
a new shape, and the whole style is more copious and literary in
character than in any other form of the work.
Whilst some of the changes or interpolations seem to carry us further
from the truth, others contain facts of Asiatic nature or history, as
well as of Polo’s own experiences, which it is extremely difficult to
ascribe to any hand but the Traveller’s own. This was the view taken
by Baldelli, Klaproth, and Neumann;[14] but Hugh Murray, Lazari, and
Bartoli regard the changes as interpolations by another hand; and
Lazari is rash enough to ascribe the whole to a _rifacimento_ of
Ramusio’s own age, asserting it to contain interpolations not merely
from Polo’s own contemporary Hayton, but also from travellers of later
centuries, such as Conti, Barbosa, and Pigafetta. The grounds for these
last assertions have not been cited, nor can I trace them. But I admit
_to a certain extent_ indications of modern tampering with the text,
especially in cases where proper names seem to have been identified
and more modern forms substituted. In days, however, where an Editor’s
duties were ill understood, this was natural.
[Sidenote: Injudicious tamperings in Ramusio.]