2. Mr. Hugh Murray Objects That Whilst In The Old Texts Polo Appears To Look On Kublai With Reverence As A Faultless Prince, In The Ramusian We Find Passages Of An Opposite Tendency, As In The Chapter About Ahmad.

3. The same editor points to the manner in which one of the Ramusian additions represents the traveller to have visited the Palace of the Chinese Kings at Kinsay, which he conceives to be inconsistent with Marco's position as an official of the Mongol Government.

(See vol. ii. p. 208.)

If we could conceive the Ramusian additions to have been originally notes written by old Maffeo Polo on his nephew's book, this hypothesis would remove almost all difficulty.

One passage in Ramusio seems to bear a reference to the date at which these interpolated notes were amalgamated with the original. In the chapter on Samarkand (i. p. 191) the conversion of the Prince Chagatai is said in the old texts to have occurred "not a great while ago" (il ne a encore grament de tens). But in Ramusio the supposed event is fixed at "one hundred and twenty-five years since." This number could not have been uttered with reference to 1298, the year of the dictation at Genoa, nor to any year of Polo's own life. Hence it is probable that the original note contained a date or definite term which was altered by the compiler to suit the date of his own compilation, some time in the 14th century.]

[18] In the first edition of Ramusio the preface contained the following passage, which is omitted from the succeeding editions; but as even the first edition was issued after Ramusio's own death, I do not see that any stress can be laid on this:

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