Meanwhile, his father and uncle, who had hitherto looked to Marco for the continuation of the Polo family, and who had vainly endeavoured by the offer of large sums of money to redeem him from captivity, began to deliberate upon the course which they ought to adopt under the present circumstances; and it was resolved that Nicolo, the younger and more vigorous of the two, should himself marry. Four years after this marriage, Marco was set at liberty at the intercession of the most illustrious citizens of Genoa; but on returning to Venice he found that three new members had been added to the Polo family during his absence, his father having had so many sons by his young wife. Marco continued, however, to live in the greatest harmony and happiness with his new relations; and shortly afterward marrying himself, had two daughters, Maretta and Fantina, but no sons. Upon the death of his father, Marco erected a monument to his memory in the portico of the church of St. Lorenzo, with an inscription stating that it was built in honour of the traveller’s father. Neither the exact date of his father’s death nor of his own has hitherto been ascertained; but it is supposed that our illustrious traveller’s decease took place either in the year 1323 or 1324. According to Mr. Marsden’s opinion, he was then seventy years of age; but if we follow the opinion of the majority of writers, and of M. Walkenaer among the rest, he must have attained the age of seventy-three or seventy-four. The male line of the Polos became extinct in 1417, and the only surviving female was married to a member of the noble house of Trevisino, one of the most illustrious in Venice. When the travels of Marco Polo first appeared, they were generally regarded as a fiction; and this absurd belief had so far gained ground, that when he lay upon his deathbed, his friends and nearest relatives, coming to take their eternal adieu, conjured him, as he valued the salvation of his soul, to retract whatever he had advanced in his book, or at least such passages as every person looked upon as untrue; but the traveller, whose conscience was untroubled upon that score, declared solemnly in that awful moment, that far from being guilty of exaggeration, he had not described one-half of the wonderful things which he had beheld. Such was the reception which the discoveries of this extraordinary man experienced when first promulgated. By degrees, however, as enterprise lifted more and more the veil from central and eastern Asia, the relations of our traveller rose in the estimation of geographers; and now that the world, though still containing many unknown tracts, has been more successfully explored, we begin to perceive that Marco Polo, like Herodotus, was a man of the most rigid veracity, whose testimony presumptuous ignorance alone can call in question.