thought that "some later fabler," like Odoric, had stuffed the knight's tale. Maundeville raided also the fables of Solinus, the forged letter of Prester John, the travels of King Hayton of Armenia, and the varied lore and legend of all lands and times collected in the preceding century by the great encyclopædist of the Middle Ages, Vincent of Beauvais. Apparently he never heard of Polo.

The bogus knight won a wide and fascinated audience by throwing his marvels into a tale of which he is the hero. His own adventures, his travels from land to land, his comments on countries and peoples, give his book unity, movement, and the narrative interest which is lacking in the works of Ctesias, Pliny, Solinus, and their school. Ctesias writes of India, but never professes to have been there, and Pliny and Solinus sit afar and look over the world. Maundeville comes out of the library and crosses the earth, staff in hand, in an earlier, and unhallowed, Pilgrim's Progress. His is the method, and his almost was the vogue, of the Odyssey and of the Sindbad saga. The classic brevity and sterility in recounting mirabilia, he escapes in some measure, robbing several fables to enrich one. It happened that an early rendering of his work into English was done when the island tongue was in a fluid state, and done with such sense of idiom that he has been called, although falsely, the father of English prose.

Maundeville is most interesting when he is most audacious, or when he stumbles most. At Joppa he transposes the figures of a classic myth, and reports seeing a rib forty feet long of "Andromeda a great giant," chained there before Noah's flood. The chameleon (chamois?) is "a little Beast, as a Goat." In Pathen the giant tortoise of Odoric becomes "a kind of Snails that be so great that many Persons may lodge them in their Shells." The rats in the Isle of Charia are "as great as Hounds here." There are wool-bearing hens in Mancy. The manna in the Land of Job "cleanseth the Blood and putteth out Melancholy." Chaldea is a country of fair men and evil women. In the Pepper Country "the Women shave their Beards and the Men not."

The author scatters his mythical islands even over the mainland of Asia. Yet his sense of the shape and rotundity of the

earth was far in advance of his time. In the midst of romancings, one finds this, the clearest word of his century, and in the field of exploration the most constructive: "I say to you certainly that Men may environ all the Earth of all the World, as well underneath as above, and return again to their Country, if that they had Company and Shipping and Conduct; and always they should find Men, Lands and Isles, as well as in this Country." For this declaration, for the vision of the Valley of the Shadow of Death which Bunyan took from him and he from Odoric, for the delight that his fictitious narrative still conveys, and for the English prose which is its vehicle, one may half forgive the physician of Liege his pose of a gouty English knight, dictating the true story of adventurous years to ease hours of broken rest, and ending it with a benediction, followed, anthemwise, by a chorus of amens.

The remainder of the story of marvel, so far as it is a literary phenomenon, is a sea tale told by men of the west, for Prince Henry the Navigator was born a few years after Jean de Bourgogne died, and with his manhood there opens the era of maritime discovery. Meanwhile the northwest of Europe had entered the record with Norse and Irish chapters. Though maps of the early Middle Ages placed the griffins and the cynocephali in the north of Europe, the north knew them not. Giants and trolls it knew, and the Iceland sagas tell of vampires that hid in heaps of stockfish, and monster men, dragons, and bulls that guarded a haunted shore. The inevitable compilations came later. The history of Norway written by Pontoppidan in the eighteenth century is a brief for Scandinavian waters as the habitat of prodigious things.

The Celts neither robbed nor traded on the sea, and the very ports of Ireland were opened by Northmen; yet one of the three great epics of the deep, the Voyage of St. Brendan, is Irish, and monks are its heroes. The five Irish Imrama or sea tales, of which this is the chief, weave a spell beyond any other woven upon the deep, because they look westward toward hidden continents that presently were to loom through the mists, and track with spectral craft the very seas that foamed erelong around the prows of Spain. Working with bits of old beliefs, as a craftsman with bits of broken glass, the Celt fashioned an oriel win

dow through which he glimpsed the lands of dream. It was magic like that of Gwyn ab Nudd, King of Faerie, who spread before St. Collen the semblance of a feast in a great court. "I will not eat the leaves of trees," said the saint, and flung holy water about him, and "there was neither castle, nor troops, nor maidens, nor music, nor the appearance of any thing whatever, but the green hillocks."

Fables of old time which had smoldered through the later Middle Ages, and which were rekindled by fresh contacts with classic marvel in the revival of letters, blazed into fierce life in the age of discovery. When new continents swam into ken, and hidden empires showed themselves for a moment on distant mountain sides, only to crash down at the onset of a handful of adventurous men, nothing seemed incredible. A world which had denied its own shape awoke to the fact of antipodal lands and peoples and was prepared to believe anything. The extravagant things it credited-and herein is palliation for its credulity—were yet small beside the wonders with which reality smote it in the face. The prodigious races of antiquity that had retreated before the traveler seemed at last to have been run to cover in those parts of the New World whither Spanish explorers penetrated. South America presented itself as a fulfillment of classic wonder and a proof of the unity of the human story.

Mythical America was in part a projection of the dreaming mind of Spain upon the sensitive consciousness of savages. There are stories that have a way of taking root as soon as they are transplanted, and by the incorporation of native elements of accommodating themselves so completely to new surroundings as to deceive the very men who had loosed them. Hence the mingling of Old and New World elements in the tales of giants, pygmies, Amazons, satyrs, and acephalites. The conquistadors put leading questions, and had the answers they wanted. If they were deceived, yet there was more of the scientific spirit in the men who set out in search of Paradise or El Dorado, than in all the generations of encyclopædists who copied down incredible things and never went forth to find them.

One may trace the outlines of Mythical America in the journals of Columbus; in the writings of Peter Martyr and Garcilaso de la Vega; in the monographs of conquistadors like Coronado;

in the History of the Indies by Oviedo, which Las Casas unjustly declares is "as full of lies almost as pages," and in Hakluyt's Principal Voyages, justly called the English prose epic. For the most fabulous and fascinating picture one turns to Raleigh's account of his expedition to Guiana in 1595. It is at once a collection of mirabilia, a story of adventure, a courtly address to the "Lady of Ladies" (Queen Elizabeth), a commercial prospectus, and the brief of a man on the defensive. In its pages the southern coasts of the Caribbean are as rich in marvel as the southern coasts of the Mediterranean in the pages of Pliny.

Earlier travelers had found it well to secure specimens of ores, plants, and savages as vouchers for their credit among skeptical stay-at-homes, and the Spaniards took the precaution of carrying notaries in their ships to attest their statements. In the eighteenth century a more effective check was developed for travel tales. The science of criticism superseded the habit of compilation. The reports of travelers were examined, sifted, and compared by closet philosophers. French savants like Buache, Delisle, and Fleurieu challenged the realms of prodigy and had no answer from them. Humboldt's great journey into Spanish America at the end of the century is the recessional. Through the lands of legend he wends his way, a patient, sometimes a pensive, observer, and puts Atlantis, El Dorado, the Amazons and the wild men of the woods to the question. His report is the most tolerant, suggestive, and illuminating document in the literature of marvel. Soon afterward began the scientific study of European folklore with the brothers Grimm as pioneers.

The remarkable things which the North American Indian had to tell, most of them, were not assayed until after Humboldt's time. Save where the Spaniard had been, they have the undiluted aboriginal quality; yet a bookish note, which has been imputed to Viking influence before Columbus, is in eastern Algonquin and Eskimo sea lore and giant lore. These tales of the northern continent did not launch expeditions, nor enter the great narratives of travel, and they have yet to win their indicated place in literature. There is wonder in them, and poetry, and the deep reflection of untutored minds; though crude the

backgrounds and the figures that animate them, they parallel almost the entire array of legendary lands and peoples which the classic world assembled. Skillful old story-tellers—“delight-makers" they were called-told them at night about a dim fire in the ceremonial roundhouses. Winter was the time, for then, says Schoolcraft, the strange beings that might be underground or in the lakes and streams could not hear through the frozen surfaces the merry tales that the Indian dared tell about them, and the laughter of the roundhouse.

Rude are these records of a people whose trickster-hero might be the obscene and ofttimes ridiculous coyote instead of Ulysses; who spoke of caribou back-fat and not of the lotus, and who had "the sacred groaning stick" rather than the lyre of Hermes. Their myth-figures, no demigods of marble perfection, are the coyote, the buzzard, the hare, the loon, the lizard-in reality the Indian in his nakedness; and their evil beings are flint people and awesome rolling skulls. Yet they could see in the stars the light of lodge fires, speak of the rainbow as the road of the dead, picture the whirlwind as the dance of a ghost, find a relation between a gust and the flutter of a moth's wings, trace the drift of spirits down the wind, and catch on the throat of the humming bird a gleam of the fire it stole in a Promethean adventure. No weary Titan upholds the Indian sky, but in Tlingit story an old woman stands under the earth with a mighty post and supports it.

Shape-shifting is at the basis of North American myth, and the substantial identity of men and animals is proclaimed by it. "Baalam's ass," says Leland, "spoke once for every Christian; every animal spoke once for the Indian."

If one marvels how the fabric of fable held together so long alike in classic and savage lands, one has only to make some change in a familiar bedtime story told to children. Their protest is instant; they want the tale as they have heard it. So do men.