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He only "thinks he 's thinking." He does, in reality, nothing at all but eat, drink, talk, and enjoy himself. Amory, Buncle's creator, was in all probability an honest man, or he would hardly have been innocent enough to put such extravagances on paper. What Mrs. Amory thought of the seven wives does not appear. Probably he invented them before he knew her; perhaps was not anxious to be reminded of them afterwards. When he was in the zenith of his health and spirits, he must have been a prodigious fellow over a bottle and beefsteak.

It is hardly necessary to say, that by the insertion of passages from this fantastical book no disrespect is intended to the respectable sect of Unitarians; who, probably, care as little for Buncle's friendship as the Trinitarians do for his enmity. There is apt to be too little real Christianity in polemics of any kind ; and John is no exception to the remark. He contrives to be so absurd, even when most reasonable, that the charms of Nature herself and of animal spirits would suffer under his admiration and example, if readers could not easily discern the difference; and even the youngest need scarcely be warned against overlooking it. Our volumes are intended to include all the phases of humanity that can be set before them without injury; and among these were not to be omitted the eccentric.

DELIGHTS OF BOOKS OF TRAVEL.

FROM WILLIAM DE RUBRUQUIS, MARCO POLO, LEDYARD, AND MUNGO PARK.

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N an old house, or new house, or any house, but particularly in a house in the country, where there are storms at night, and the wind is thundering in the trees, and the rain comes dashing against the windows in the gusts of it, who does not think of men at sea, of disasters by shipwreck, of husbands and sons far away, struggling perhaps in breakers

on the shore, or clinging to icy shrouds, while we are lying in the safe and warm bed? It seems as if none of us ought to be comfortable on such occasions; and yet, provided we do our duty to the unfortunate, we ought to be as much so as we can; for, in the first place, none of our friends may be in danger; and, secondly, Nature, in the course of her harshest but always beneficent operations, never desires more suffering to be inflicted than can be helped.

Now, homes have always a tendency to make us think of remote places; comfortable beds remind us of travellers by night; and comfortable books, of travellers at all hours who cannot get any; but of all books, those which are written by travellers themselves give us a quintessence of all these feelings; and the older the books are, and the remoter the countries they treat of, the completer becomes our satisfaction, because the antiquity itself has become a sort of reverend novelty, and danger is over with

all parties except in the happy shuddering sense of it on the part of the reader.

"With many a tempest had his beard been shaken,"

says Chaucer of his seaman. It had been shaken, observe. So have all the beards of travellers of old; and the older or more ancient they were, the more bearded one fancies them. An old folio book of romantic yet credible voyages and travels to read, an old bearded traveller for its hero, a fireside in an old country house to read it by, curtains drawn, and just wind enough stirring out of doors to make an accompaniment to the billows or forests we are reading of, this surely is one of the perfect moments of existence.

English reading of this kind, we mean the reading of books of travels in the English language, may be said to commence with the travels of good old William de Rubruquis and accomplished Marco Polo. See how instinctively our good friend Dr. John Harris, thorough disinterested bookworm, and one of the fathers of these collections of knowledge, intimates their superiority over their precursors, in the Table of Contents prefixed to his huge folio volumes, one of which is now before

us:

"An Account of the Several Passages to the Indies, both by sea and land, that have been attempted, discovered, or practised by the Ancients.

"An Account of the Travels of two Mahommedans through India and China in the ninth century.

"The Travels of Rabbi Benjamin, the son of Jonas of Tudela, through Europe, Asia, and Africa, from Spain to China, from the year of our Lord 1160 to 1173; from the Latin versions of Benedict Arias Montanus, and Constantine l'Empereur, compared with other Translations into different languages."

“The remarkable Travels of William de Rubruquis, a monk, sent by Louis IX., king of France, commonly styled St. Louis, ambassador into different parts of the East, particularly into

Tartary and China, A.D. 1253, containing abundance of curious Particulars relating to those Countries, written by the Ambassador, and addressed to his Royal Master King Louis.

"The curious and remarkable Voyages and Travels of Marco Polo, a gentleman of Venice, who, in the middle of the thirteenth century, passed through a great part of Asia, all the dominions of the Tartars, and returned home by sea through the Islands of the East Indies; taken chiefly from the accurate edition of Ramusio, compared with an original manuscript in His Prussian Majesty's library, and with most of the translations hitherto published."

The very tables of contents in these good folio writers, who give "full measure, pressed down and running over," are a kind of books in themselves, and save us the trouble of stating who their heroes were. Only, for the pleasure of the thing, we may add, that these two fine old voyagers, from whom we are about to make some extracts, were, the one as simple, honest, truthtelling, and intelligent a soul withal as ever took monkery for a good thing; and the other, a man of as proved a credibility in his way, a noble, trading, and accomplished Venetian, though he may have leant his ear a little too much to reports. He dealt in such very large and prosperous matters, both of jewellery and government, and saw such heaps of countries, and cities, and populations, and revenues, that although he fairly overbore the incredulity of his astounded countrymen with the bushels of diamonds and precious stones which he poured forth before their eyes (in a scene which our readers will meet with), he left behind him the nickname of Marco Milione; and a worthy epitomiser of his book informs us, that the Venetians in their carnival entertainments long had a character of that name, whose "chief jest lay in describing cities with a million of bridges, husbands with a million of wives, birds with a million of wings, beasts with a million of legs," &c.* But if Marco had

* Vide Mr. MacFarlane, himself a traveller, and very shrewd and entertaining observer, in a publication entitled the Romance of Travel, vol. i., p. 239

come to life again, he might have retorted by personifying a buffoon populace possessed of a million of ignorances. Marco, like Bruce, has outlived misconception. Every fresh traveller has tended to confirm the relations both of him and Rubruquis; and as those relations chiefly concern one of the largest, most curious, and most unchanging countries and people on the face of the earth, they present a singular combination of modern with ancient interest. The Tartars are still nomade rovers in one part of their vast possessions, and Chinese rulers in the other. Their dresses are the same as of old, their faces the same; they still exhibit the same mixture of great and civilized, yet clumsy, undertakings; and if in their joint character of Tartar and Chinese, their philosopher, Confucius, has rendered them a far wiser and more thinking people than is supposed even by the thinking European (himself not so free from prejudice and foolish custom as he fancies), their jealousy of innovation is a remnant of the old Tartar pride, as well as an instinct of security. The greatest innovation in China, next to philosophy, was tea; which, however, appears to be of older date than the times of Polo and Rubruquis, though Mr. MacFarlane has observed the curious fact of their making no mention of it. There are no three ideas which we associate more strongly with the two great portions of the East, than tea with the Chinese, and coffee and smoking with the Turks and Persians; yet tea is not alluded to by the oldest Chinese writers, and the use of coffee and tobacco by mankind dates no further back than a few centuries. There is no mention of smoking in the Arabian Nights;

(Knight's Weekly Volumes). We have read Mr. MacFarlane's first two little books with the greatest pleasure; but, though not wanting in curious extract as well as abridgment, he is too summary for the purpose of the present book. Our extracts from Marco Polo and Rubruquis are taken from the revised republication of Harris;-Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca; or, a Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels, consisting of above six hundred of the most authentic writers, &c., two volumes folio, 1764. Harris includes Hackluyt and Purchas, and translations from the best authorities in other languages.

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