The generation immediately preceding his own has bequeathed to us, in the Report of the Franciscan Friar William de Rubruquis,[1] on the Mission with which St. Lewis charged him to the Tartar Courts, the narrative of one great journey, which, in its rich detail, its vivid pictures, its acuteness of observation and strong good sense, seems to me to form a Book of Travels of much higher claims than _any one series_ of Polo’s chapters; a book, indeed, which has never had justice done to it, for it has few superiors in the whole Library of Travel. Enthusiastic Biographers, beginning with Ramusio, have placed Polo on the same platform with Columbus. But where has our Venetian Traveller left behind him any trace of the genius and lofty enthusiasm, the ardent and justified previsions which mark the great Admiral as one of the lights of the human race?[2] It is a juster praise that the spur which his Book eventually gave to geographical studies, and the beacons which it hung out at the Eastern extremities of the Earth helped to guide the aims, though scarcely to kindle the fire, of the greater son of the rival Republic. His work was at least a link in the Providential chain which at last dragged the New World to light.[3] [Sidenote: His true claims to glory.] 67. Surely Marco’s real, indisputable, and, in their kind, unique claims to glory may suffice! _He was the first Traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of_ ASIA, _naming and describing kingdom after kingdom which he had seen with his own eyes; the Deserts of_ PERSIA, _the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of_ BADAKHSHAN, _the jade-bearing rivers of_ KHOTAN, _the_ MONGOLIAN _Steppes, cradle of the power that had so lately threatened to swallow up Christendom, the new and brilliant Court that had been established at_ CAMBALUC: _The first Traveller to reveal_ CHINA _in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities, its rich manufactures, its swarming population, the inconceivably vast fleets that quickened its seas and its inland waters; to tell us of the nations on its borders with all their eccentricities of manners and worship; of_ TIBET _with its sordid devotees; of_ BURMA _with its golden pagodas and their tinkling crowns; of_ LAOS, _of_ SIAM, _of_ COCHIN CHINA, _of_ JAPAN, _the Eastern Thule, with its rosy pearls and golden-roofed palaces; the first to speak of that Museum of Beauty and Wonder, still so imperfectly ransacked, the_ INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO, _source of those aromatics then so highly prized and whose origin was so dark; of_ JAVA _the Pearl of Islands; of_ SUMATRA _with its many kings, its strange costly products, and its cannibal races; of the naked savages of_ NICOBAR _and_ ANDAMAN; _of_ CEYLON _the Isle of Gems with its Sacred Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of_ INDIA THE GREAT, _not as a dream-land of Alexandrian fables, but as a country seen and partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans,