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.]
2. The first person who attempted to gather and string the facts of Marco
Polo's personal history was his countryman, the celebrated John Baptist
Ramusio. His essay abounds in what we now know to be errors of detail,
but, prepared as it was when traditions of the Traveller were still rife
in Venice, a genuine thread runs through it which could never have been
spun in later days, and its presentation seems to me an essential element
in any full discourse upon the subject.
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