Mediæval Travellers is due rather to the width of his experience, the
vast compass of his journeys, and the romantic nature of his personal
history, than to transcendent superiority of character or capacity.
The generation immediately preceding his own has bequeathed to us, in
the Report of the Franciscan Friar William de Rubruquis,[1] on the
Mission with which St. Lewis charged him to the Tartar Courts, the
narrative of one great journey, which, in its rich detail, its vivid
pictures, its acuteness of observation and strong good sense, seems
to me to form a Book of Travels of much higher claims than _any one
series_ of Polo’s chapters; a book, indeed, which has never had justice
done to it, for it has few superiors in the whole Library of Travel.
Enthusiastic Biographers, beginning with Ramusio, have placed Polo on
the same platform with Columbus. But where has our Venetian Traveller
left behind him any trace of the genius and lofty enthusiasm, the
ardent and justified previsions which mark the great Admiral as one
of the lights of the human race?[2] It is a juster praise that the
spur which his Book eventually gave to geographical studies, and the
beacons which it hung out at the Eastern extremities of the Earth
helped to guide the aims, though scarcely to kindle the fire, of the
greater son of the rival Republic. His work was at least a link in the
Providential chain which at last dragged the New World to light.[3]
[Sidenote: His true claims to glory.]