to give us an impetus in the right direction; and here again France points the way. However desirable it may be, from other points of view, to raise the labourers' wages, the land-question will not be solved by any such action. We must make up our minds to adapt our system, as France has done, to modern conditions, and to concentrate upon a rapid increase of small holdings. Agriculture cannot compete with industry as a profession for wage-earners; but, where a man will not stay upon the land as a labourer, he will remain as his own master, reaping the full fruits of his toil; and it is in arming agriculture with this counter-attraction that we shall enable it to hold its own against industry as a profession. With regard to the vexed question of ownership versus tenancy, it may be said that both kinds of tenure are needed; but the fact that, under a free system, the majority of small holdings are owned, while, on the other hand, the greater number of large farms are farmed by tenants, is substantial proof that ownership answers best for the smallholder.

It is an inspiring thought that, if we could bring as much of our land in proportion under cultivation as France, we could almost triple our agricultural population, raising it from a little over three millions to possibly between eight and nine millions. To those of us who know the conditions of the masses in our towns, even from the outside, this might well seem to be a gain worth heavy sacrifices; to those of us who have gained an inside glance, and have seen, perhaps, that most terrible comment of all upon our civilisation, the thousands of invalid and deformed little children, crowded in backstreets, who are never seen outside the dreary slums in which their lives are passed, it must seem the supreme duty of our generation. The crown of twentieth-century statesmanship awaits the man who shall arise with the knowledge and character to grapple with this problem apart from party bias or class prejudice.

ROSAMOND F. SPEDDING.

Art. 3.-THE TRAVELS OF SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE.

1. The Buke of John Maundevill. Edited with Introduction and Notes by Sir George Warner. Roxburghe Club, 1889.

2. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Edited by A. W. Pollard. Macmillan, 1900.

3. Untersuchungen über Johann von Mandeville und die Quellen seiner Reisebeschreibung. Von Albert Bovenschen. Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde. Berlin: Reimer, 1888.

4. Handschriftliche Untersuchungen über die englische Version Mandeville's. By J. Vogels. Crefeld, 1891. 5. Etude Critique sur Jean d'Outremeuse.

Par G. Kurth. Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Brussels. Hayez,

1910.

IT has long since been proved that the book known as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville' is a mere compilation, written by a man who need not have travelled beyond his library, and who probably was a resident and a native of the episcopal city of Liége. In learned documents, such as the catalogue of printed books in the British Museum and in the National Biography of Belgium, we find him entered under the fictitious name of Jean des Preis, which he assumed along with a fantastic and aristocratic pedigree, while his real surname, d'Outremeuse, appears only in a subordinate position. Far from having set out on his travels in 1322, as stated of Sir John Mandeville, he was in that year a resident in limbo, from which he emerged through birth in 1338; in 1356, the date of the fictitious journey's end, he was only a stripling, probably in minor orders, and on his way to become a notary. His learned biographer knows of him as having in 1383 served on a commission of enquiry against certain partisans of the anti-pope Clement VII, and three years later, on a similar commission against local aldermen. In 1395, he held a claustral house of the Cathedral of St Lambert. The date of his death is 1400. He was thus almost exactly contemporary with Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400).

Being thus provided with an outline of the life of the

notary who did not travel, how are we to account for the appearance in literary history of the English Ulysses, Sir John Mandeville, knight? From three various sources particulars of his life have been collected and built up into a biography. First there is the book of Travels itself, which claims him as its author; but, being neither original nor truthful, it deserves little credit. A testimony that cannot so easily be set aside is that of his funeral monument, which has been inspected and described by four independent witnesses in four separate centuries, and from which his epitaph has been copied and published several times. It seems hypercritical to dismiss this as a fake, and to argue that a notary who made himself guilty of a book of semi-fictitious history is likely to have spent money on contriving a cenotaph in the church of the Guillemins near Liége, and on devising the effigy, epitaph and coat of arms of a man who was not buried there. Even if we could admit that our notary was capable of a practical joke of that kind, there would still remain another difficulty. Would the prior of the convent of the Guillemins have lent the consecrated soil of his church for the purpose? This we take the liberty to doubt. He might, we imagine, allow the heirs of Sir John Mandeville (or Montevilla) to draw up the funeral inscription in any style they pleased, but he would like to think that the deceased, in whose name 'Priez pour moi' was carved on the slab, was a Christian soul, and not the figment of a scoffer's brain. We are therefore inclined to accept the evidence of the tombstone as genuine, even if the facts stated in it might be coloured, as epitaphs are apt to be, by the piety of survivors.*

The epitaph itself, as reconstructed from various readings by Dr A. Bovenschen, contains no preposterous claims to high nobility and may very well be that of a popular physician :

'Here lies the gentle Sir John Mandeville, otherwise called With the Beard, knight, lord of Camp[er]di, a native of England. He was learned in physic, much addicted to prayer,

*Readers of M. Bédier's learned book, 'Les légendes épiques,' may object that cenotaphs of fictitious characters are mentioned by him (vol. ii, pp. 309-310). But he rightly argues that such monuments were not likely to have arisen unless the hero's fame was first firmly established.

and left large legacies to the poor. After travelling nearly over all the world, he died in Liége on November 17th, 1372.' 'All the world' is a very elastic phrase, both in the French and English vernacular, and no one need take it too literally. A more serious objection is raised by the ascription of knightly rank to the dead man, as we have no record of an English knight of that name whose dates tally exactly with his. Yet let us remember that the number of villages and families called Montville, Magneville, etc., is fairly large. All the other statements contained in that epitaph are perfectly acceptable. Why should we deny that a native of England, claiming to be a knight, lived in Liége during the reign of Edward III (whose queen hailed from Hainaut and who fought so many battles near or in the Netherlands), that he had visited the medical schools of France and Italy, that he laid claim to some acquaintance with the East, from which drugs and talismans were procured, and that he died as a well-to-do and successful empiric?

The evidence of the funeral monument does not throw the least light on the book of Travels or on the connexion between the dead doctor and Jean d'Outremeuse. The doctor may have had nothing to do with the book, as the leading Belgian and English scholars seem inclined to believe. For in the common Latin version of the Travels a new problem is raised, by which the whole tale is still further confused. Here Sir John Mandeville and the physician 'ad Barbam,' instead of being two names for one character, as in the epitaph, became two separate individuals, whom chance brings together in distant climes and under different circumstances. First they meet in Cairo, in the Sowdan's household, to which each is attached in his professional capacity. In later years, when the knight is laid up with gout in Liége:

'I consulted,' says the text, 'several physicians of the town, and, as the Lord would have it, one came in whom his age and white hair made more venerable than the others, and who gave proof of being very expert in his art. He was there called Master John ad Barbam. After some conversation he spoke words which renewed the old acquaintance formed long ago between us at Cairo in Egypt, in the Sowdan's castle, as I said above in Chap. VII. After applying

his knowledge of medicine to my great relief, he warmly admonished and prayed me to commit to writing some of the things that I had seen during my travels through the world, so that posterity might read and hear it for their own advantage. So this my treatise was put together by his advice and assistance. .

Let us first notice, in passing, that this new story is an instance of the familiar process of duplication, by which most of d'Outremeuse's inventions were generated. Next we shall point to its inconsistency with one of the other two accounts of the composition of the Travels which are contained in the familiar English version. According to one of these, the traveller wrote down his experiences before his return, and submitted his book for approval at the Pope's court in Rome on his way home. To this the commentators object that in 1356 the Papal Court was in Avignon, so that it cannot possibly be correct. Immediately after this untrue (and, I believe, ironical) account comes another; the traveller first returns to Liége, is laid up with gout, and 'taking solace in his wretched rest,' writes down his marvellous adventures. Here, then, we are confronted with three presentations of the same fact, each at variance with the two others, and one contradicted by the epitaph in the Guillemins' church. If one of them were less acceptable than the others, we might get rid of it by the well-worn trick of calling it an interpolation, but it will be safer to credit all of them to the fertile brain of d'Outremeuse the romancer, from which so many elaborate and plausible fables have been hatched.

Whether there was not a grain of truth at the bottom of those various accounts of the physician John ad Barbam's authorship it is impossible to tell. A book patched together, like the Travels, from extracts or slips drawn from various sources may very well have been the fruit of collaboration; and over the whole composition hangs a flavour of the dispensary. Names of drugs and health-giving stones are enumerated, the animal side of humanity, even in its more unsavoury manifestations, is dwelt upon with a medical student's zest, nor is there a lack of what Sir Thomas Browne calls the slander of

* Itinerarius, chap. 50. Black letter. British Museum, G 6700.