At a period when Europe could hardly boast of three leisurely wayfarers stealing over the face of the universe; when the Orient still remained but a Land of Faery, and "the map of the world" was yet unfinished; at a time when it required a whole life to traverse a space which three years might now terminate, Sir JOHN MANDEVILLE set forth to enter unheard-of regions. Returning home, after an absence of more than thirty years, he discovered a "mervayle" strange as those which he loved to record--that he was utterly forgotten by his friends! He had returned "maugre himself," for four-and-thirty years had not satiated his curiosity; his noble career had submitted to ordinary infirmities--to gout and the aching of his limbs; these, he lamentably tells, had "defined the end of my labour against my will, God knoweth!" The knight in this pilgrimage of life seems to have contracted a duty with God, that while he had breath he should peregrinate, and, having nothing to do at home, be honourable in his generation by his enterprise over the whole earth. And earnestly he prays "to all the _readers_ and _hearers_ of my book," (for "hearers" were then more numerous than "readers,") "to say for him a _Pater-Noster_ with an _Ave-Maria_." He wrote for "solace in his wretched rest;" but the old passion, the devotion of his soul, finally triumphed over all arthritic pangs. The globe evidently was his true home; and thus Liege, and not London, received the bones of an unwearied traveller, whose thoughts were ever passing beyond the equator. With us, to whom an excursion to "the Londe of Promyssioun or of Behest" has sometimes arisen out of a morning engagement--we who impelled by steam go "whither we list," with those billets which might serve as letters of recommendation in the steppes of Tartary,--we may wonder how our knight, who would not win his way by the arts of commerce, like his predecessor Marco Polo, bore up his chivalry; for in his traversing he had nothing to offer but his honourable sword, and probably his medical science, which might be sometimes as perilous. But difficulties insuperable to us could not enter into the emotions, nor were they the accidents which impeded the traveller, "who, on the day of St. Michael, in the year of our Lord 1322, passed the sea, and went the way to Hierusalem, and to behold the mervayles of Inde." A deep religious emotion, an obscure indefinite curiosity, and a courageous decision to wander wherever the step of man could press on the globe, to tell the world "the mervayles" it unconsciously holds within its orb, were the inspiration of a journey which stood next in solemnity to a departure to the world of spirits. Sir John had prepared himself, for he was learned not only in languages, but in authentic romance, and in romantic history; and he honestly resolved to tell all "the mervayles" which he had seen, and those which he had not; and these last were not the least.