In some of the early matches in the United Kingdom the ground was about 400 yards long and 200 yards wide, the width of the goal being from 30 to 35 yards. Under the present rules of the Hurlingham Club, which is now the principal authority on the game, it is provided that the goals shall be “not less than 250 yards apart and that each goal shall be 8 yards wide.” The English name of the game is perhaps derived from “pulu,” which is the Tibetan for a ball, and the pastime itself reached India from Persia through Afghanistan. It speedily gained favour with the officers of British cavalry regiments quartered in India, and was introduced into the United Kingdom in 1871 by the 10th Hussars. As far as can be ascertained the first match played on English soil took place at Aidershot in the spring of that year. This, however, is not absolutely certain, as no records seem to have been preserved of the early contests.

Under the rules of the game as now played the opposing parties may consist of from three to six players a side, the number in all matches for cups or prizes being limited to four. Each of the players is mounted on a pony which must not exceed fourteen hands and which must be free from any vice. As the description of the game as “hockey on horseback” would imply, the object of the pastime is to force a ball by means of a stick, with which each player is furnished, through the goal of the opposing side. The size of the ball is 3 inches in diameter, and the sticks are 4 feet long with a cross piece at one end for the purpose of striking the ball. At the commencement of a game each side takes up its position behind the goal posts. A player on each side is appointed as goal-keeper. On a flag being dropped to notify the commencement of the game, the other players gallop towards the centre of the ground at full speed, their object being to reach the ball first and drive it in the direction of the opposite goal. When a ball is hit out of bounds it is thrown into play again by one of the umpires, of whom there is one appointed for each side before the commencement of a match. When a ball is hit beyond the goal without passing through it the side defending goal is entitled to a “hit off,” which must be made from the goal line. It is allowable in the course of play to impede an adversary and hinder his stroke by hooking his stick, but this must not be done either under or over his pony. Whilst it is permissible for a player to interpose his pony before his antagonist so as to prevent the latter reaching the ball, it is expressly forbidden to cross another player in possession of the ball except at such a distance as to avoid all possibility of collision. Should a player break his stick or have it broken he must ride to the appointed place where the sticks are kept and take one, and on no account is one to be brought to him. If he drops his stick he must dismount and pick it up, and is not allowed to hit the ball whilst dismounted. If a player is in front of a player of his own side who hits the ball, and has not two—or in case of matches of four a side, one—of the opposing side between him and the hostile goal, and has not come through the “bully,” he is “off side.” He does not then come “on his side” until the ball has been hit or hit at by the opposing side, or until the player on his own side who made the hit passes him. As long as he is “off side” he may not in any way impede a player of the opposite side. In all matches the duration of play is 1 hour 10 minutes, with an interval of 5 minutes after each 20 minutes play.

Owing to the expense of maintaining a specially trained stud of ponies and a prepared ground for the pastime, the pursuit of the game of polo has always been confined to the wealthier classes in England. Its chief supporters are the younger members of the aristocracy and the officers of British cavalry regiments.

POLO, Marco (c. 1254-1324), the Venetian, the most famous perhaps of all travellers. His history needs to be introduced by some account of the preceding generation of his family, and of the state of the world which rendered their and his extensive travels possible.

Under China, in the introductory portion (vol. v. 627 sq.) we have briefly indicated the circumstances which in the last half of the 13th century and first half of the 14th threw Asia open to Western travellers to a degree unknown before and since. We first hear of the Polo family in the year 1260. The vast wave of Tartar conquest, set in motion by Jenghiz Khan, and continuing to advance for some years after his death, had swept away all political barriers from the China Sea to the western frontier of Russia. This huge extent of empire continued for a time to own a supreme chief in the Great Khan, the head of the house of Jenghiz, whose headquarters were in the Mongolian steppe. Practically indeed the empire soon began to split up into several great monarchies under the descendants of his four sons, in order of age Juji, Jagatai, Oghotai, and Tuli. At the date we have named the supreme khanate had recently devolved upon Kublai, son of Tuli, and, after the founder, the ablest of his house. In the beginning of his reign Kublai carried out the transfer of the seat of rule from Karakorum on the northern verge of the Mongolian plains to the populous and civilized regions that had been conquered in the further East, a transfer which eventually converted the Tartar khan into a Chinese emperor.

Barka, the son of Juji, and the first of the house of Jenghiz to turn Moslem, reigned on the steppes of the Volga, where a standing camp, which eventually became a great city under the name of Sarai, had been established by his brother and predecessor Batu.

Hulagu, a younger brother of Kublai, after taking Baghdad, and putting the caliph Mosta'sim to death, had become practically independent ruler of Persia, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, and Armenia,—though he and his sons and his sons’ sons continued to the end of the century to stamp the name of the Great Khan upon their coins, and to use the Chinese seal of state which he conferred.

The house of Jagatai had settled upon the pastures of the Hi and in the valley of the Jaxartes, and ruled also the populous cities of Samarkand and Bokhara.

Kaidu, grandson of Oghotai, who had been the immediate successor of Jenghiz, refused to recognize the transfer of supreme authority to his cousins, and through the long life of Kublai was a thorn in the side of the latter. His immediate authority was exercised in what we should now call Chinese Turkestan and Southern Central Siberia.

Northern China had been conquered by Jenghiz and his successors from the Tartar dynasty called Kin or “Golden,” who had held it about a century. But southern China still remained in the hands of the native dynasty, whose capital was the great city now known as Hang-chow-foo. Their dominion was still substantially intact, but its subjugation was a task to which Kublai soon turned his attention, and it became the most prominent transaction of his reign.

In India the most powerful sovereign was the Turk sultan of Delhi; but, though both Sind and Bengal owned his supremacy, no part of peninsular India had yet been invaded. The Dravidian kingdoms of the south were still untouched by foreign conquest, and the accumulated gold of ages lay in their temples and treasuries an easy prey for the coming Moslem.

In the Indo-Chinese peninsula and the Eastern Islands a variety of kingdoms and dynasties were expanding and contracting, of which we have but dim and shifting glimpses. Their advance in wealth and art, far beyond what the present state of those regions would suggest, is attested by the vast and magnificent mediaeval remains of architecture which are found at intervals over both the

Indo-Chinese continental countries and the islands, as at Pagân in Burmah, at Ayuthia in Siam, at Ongkor and many other places in Camboja, at Borobodor and Brambanan in Java. All these remains are deeply marked by Hindu influence.

Venetian genealogies and traditions of uncertain value trace the Polo family to Sebennico in Dalmatia, and before the end of the 11th century names of its members are found in the Great Council of the republic. But the ascertained line of the traveller begins only with his grandfather. Andrea Polo of S. Felice was the father of three sons, Marco, Nicolo, and Mafieo, of whom the second was the father of the subject of this article. They were presumably “noble,” i.e., belonging to the families who had seats in the Great Council, and were enrolled in the Libro d’Oro; for we know that Marco the traveller is officially so styled (nobilis vir). The three brothers were engaged in commerce: the elder Marco, resident apparently in Constantinople and in the Crimea, does not enter into the history.

In 1260 we find Nicolo and Maffeo at Constantinople. How long they had been absent from Venice we do not know. Nicolo was a married man, and had left his wife there. In the year named the two brothers went on a speculation to the Crimea, whence a succession of chances and openings carried them to the court of Barka Khan at Sarai, and further north, and eventually across the steppes to Bokhara. Here they fell in with certain envoys who had been on a mission from the Great Khan Kublai to his brother Hulagu in Persia, and by them were persuaded to make the journey to Cathay in their company. And thus the first European travellers of whom we have any knowledge reached China. Kublai, when they reached his court, was either at Cambaluc (q.v.), i.e., Peking, which he had just rebuilt on a vast scale, or at his beautiful summer seat at Shangtu in the country north of the great wall (“In Xanadu did Cubla Khan,” &c.). It was the first time that the khan, a man full of energy and intelligence, had fallen in with European gentlemen. He was delighted with the Venetian brothers, listened eagerly to all that they had to tell of the Latin world, and decided to send them back as his envoys to the pope, with letters requesting the despatch of a large body of educated men to instruct his people in Christianity and in the liberal arts. The motive of the khan’s request was doubtless much the same that some years back influenced the black king of Uganda on Lake Nyanza to make a similar request through the traveller Stanley. With Kublai, as with his predecessors, religion was chiefly a political engine. The khan must be obeyed; how man should worship God was no matter to him. But Kublai was the first of his house to rise above the essential barbarism of the Mongols, and he had been able enough to discern that the Christian church could afford the aid he desired in taming his countrymen. It was only when Rome had failed lamentably to meet his advances that he fell back upon the lamas and their trumpery as, after a fashion, civilizing instruments.

The brothers arrived at Acre in April 1269. They learned that Clement IV. had died the year before, and no new pope had yet been chosen. So they went home to Venice, where they found that Nicolo’s wife was dead, but had left a son Marco, now a fine lad of fifteen.

The papal interregnum was the longest that had been known, at least since the dark ages. After the Polos had spent two years at home there was still no pope; and the brothers resolved on starting again for the East, taking young Mark with them. At Acre they took counsel with an eminent churchman, Tedaldo, archdeacon of Liège, and took from him letters to authenticate the causes that had hindered their mission. They had not yet left Ayas on the Cilician coast (then one of the chief points for the arrival and departure of the land-trade of Asia), when news overtook them that a pope had been elected in the person of their friend Archdeacon Tedaldo. They hastened back to Acre, and at last were able to execute Kublai’s commission and to obtain a papal reply. But, instead of the hundred teachers asked for by the Great Khan, the new pope (styled Gregory X.) could supply but two Dominicans; and these lost heart and turned back, when they had barely taken the first step of their journey.

The second start from Acre must have taken place about November 1271; and from a careful consideration of the indications and succession of chapters in Marco Polo’s book, it would seem that the party proceeded from Ayas to Sivas, and then by Mardin, Mosul, and Baghdad to Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf (see 0rmus), with the purpose of going on to China by sea; but that, some obstacle having interfered which compelled them to abandon this plan, they returned northward through Persia. Traversing Kerman and Khorasan they went on to Balkh and Badakhshan, in which last country—an Oriental Switzerland, as it has been called—they were long detained by the illness of young Marco. In a passage touching on the charming climate of the hills of Badakhshan, Marco breaks into an enthusiasm which he rarely betrays, but which is easily understood by those who have known what it is, with fever in the blood, to escape to the exhilarating air and fragrant pine-groves of the Himalaya. They then ascended the upper Oxus through Wakhân to the plateau of Pamir (a name first heard in Marco’s book). Those regions, so attractive to geographers, were never described again by any European traveller till the spirited expedition in 1838 of that excellent officer the late Lieutenant John Wood of the Indian navy, whose narrative abounds in the happiest incidental illustration of Marco Polo’s chapters. Crossing the Pamir highlands, the travellers descended upon Kashgar, whence they proceeded by Yarkand to Khotan. These are regions which remained almost absolutely closed to our knowledge till within the last twenty years, when the temporary overthrow of the Chinese power, and the enterprise of travellers like the late Mr Johnson and Mr Robert Shaw, followed by the missions of Sir Douglas Forsyth and his companions, and of Mr Ney Elias, again made them known.

From Khotan they passed on to the vicinity of Lake Lop (or Lob), reached still more recently, for the first time since Marco Polo’s journey, by the indefatigable Russian officer Prejevalsky, in 1871. Thence the great desert of Gobi was crossed to Tangut, as the region at the extreme north-west of China, both within and without the Wall, was then called.

In his account of the passage of the Gobi, or desert of Lop, as he calls it, Polo gives some description of the terrors with which the suggestions of solitude and desolation have peopled such tracts in most parts of the world, a description which reproduces with singular identity that of the Chinese pilgrim Hwen T’sang (q.v.), in passing the same desert in the contrary direction six hundred years before.

The Venetians, in their further journey, were met and welcomed by the Great Khan’s people, and at last reached his presence at Shangtu, in the spring of 1275. Kublai received them with great cordiality, and took kindly to young Mark, by this time about one and twenty years of age. The “young bachelor,” as the book calls him, applied himself diligently to the acquisition of the divers languages and written characters chiefly in use among ths multifarious nationalities included in the khan’s court and administration; and Kublai, seeing that he was both clever and discreet, soon began to employ him in the public service. Μ. Pauthier, his most recent French editor, has found in the Chinese annals a record that in the year 1277 a certain Polo was nominated as a second-class commissioner or agent attached to the imperial council, a passage which we may without scruple apply to the young Venetian.

His first public mission was one which carried him through the provinces of Shansi, Shensi, and Szechuen, and the wild country on the coast of Tibet, to the remote province of Yunnan, called by the Mongols Karâjang, and into northern Burmah (Mien). Marco, during his stay at court, had observed the khan’s delight in hearing of strange countries, of their manners, marvels, and oddities, and had heard his frank expressions of disgust at the stupidity of envoys and commissioners who could tell of nothing but their official business. And he took care to store his memory or his note-book with all curious facts that were likely to interest Kublai, and these, on his return to court, he related with vivacity. This first journey led him through a country which twenty years ago was an almost absolute terra incognita,— though within that time we have learned much regarding it through the journeys of Cooper, Garnier, Richthofen, Gill, Baber, and others. In this region there existed, and there still exists, in the deep valleys of the great rivers, and in the alpine regions which border them, a vast ethnological garden, as it were, of tribes of very various origin, and in every stage of semi-civilization or barbarism; and these afforded many strange products and eccentric traits of manners to entertain the emperor.

Marco rose rapidly in favour, and was often again employed on distant missions, as ' well as in domestic administration; but we are able to gather but few details of his employment. At one time we know that he held for three years the government of the great city of Yangchow; on another occasion we find him visiting Karakorum on the north of the Gobi, the former residence of the Great Khans; again in Champa, or southern Cochin-China; and, once more, on a mission to the southern states of India. We are not informed whether his father and uncle shared in such employments, though they are specially mentioned as having rendered material service to the khan, in forwarding the capture of the city of Siang-yang-foo (on the Han river) during the war against southern China, by the construction of powerful artillery engines— a story, however, perplexed by chronological difficulties, which here we must pass over.

In any case the elder Polos were gathering wealth, which they longed to carry back to their home in the lagoons, and after their long exile they began to dread what might follow old Kublai’s death. The khan, however, was deaf to all suggestions of departure; and but for a happy chance we should have lost our mediaeval Herodotus.

Arghun, khan of Persia, the grandson of Kublai’s brother Hulagu, lost in 1286 his favourite wife, Bolgana (BulughAn or “Sable ”) by name. Her dying injunction was that her place should be filled only by a lady of her own Mongol tribe. Ambassadors were despatched to the court of Khânbâligh to obtain such a bride. The message was courteously received, and the choice fell on the lady Cocachin (Kukàchim), a maiden of seventeen, “moult bele dame et avenant.” The overland road from Peking to Tabriz was not only of portentous length for so delicate a charge, but was then imperilled by war; so the envoys of Arghun proposed to return by sea. Having made acquaintance with the Venetians, and eager to profit by their experience, especially by that of Marco, who had just returned from his mission to India, they begged the khan as a favour to send the Franks in their company. He consented with reluctance, but fitted out the party nobly for the voyage, charging them with friendly messages to the potentates of Christendom, including the king of England. They appear to have sailed from the port of Chwan-chow (or Chinchew, q.v. y ) in Fuhkien, which was then the great haven of foreign trade, and was known to Western strangers as Zaitιin, in the beginning of 1292. The voyage was an ill-starred one, involving long detention on the coast of Sumatra, and in the south of India; and two years or more passed before they arrived at their destination in Persia. Two out of the three envoys, and a vast proportion of their suite perished by the way; but the three hardier Venetians survived all perils, and so did the young lady, who had come to look on them with filial regard. It proved that Arghun Khan had been dead even before they quitted China; his brother reigned in his stead; and his son Ghazan succeeded to the lady’s hand. She took leave of the kindly Venetians, not without tears; they went on to Tabriz, and after a long delay there departed for Venice, which they seem to have reached about the end of 1295.

The first biographer of Marco Polo was the famous geographical collector John Baptist Ramusio, who wrote more than two centuries after the traveller’s death. Facts and dates sometimes contradict his statements, but his story is told with great life and picturesqueness, and we need not hesitate to accept, at least as a genuine tradition, a romantic story, too long for repetition here, of the arrival of the Polos at their family mansion in the parish of St John Chrysostom, of their appearance at its door in worn and outlandish garb, of the scornful denial of their identity, and of the shrewd stratagem by which they secured acknowledgment from the society of Venice.

Some years pass ere we hear more of Marco Polo; and it is then in a militant capacity.

Jealousies, always too characteristic of Italian communities, were in the case of Venice and Genoa sharpened by direct commercial rivalry, and had been growing in bitterness throughout the 13th century. In 1298 the Genoese made preparations on a great scale to strike a blow at their rivals on their own ground, and a powerful fleet of galleys, under Lamba Doria as admiral, made straight for the Adriatic. Venice, on hearing of the Genoese armament, hastily equipped a fleet still more numerous, and placed it under the command of Andrea Dandolo. The crew of a Venetian galley at this time amounted, all told, to 250 men, under a comito or master, but besides this officer each galley carried a sopracomito or gentleman commander, who was usually a noble. On one of the galleys of Dandolo’s fleet went Marco Polo in this last capacity.

The hostile fleets met before the island of Curzola on the 6th September, and engaged next morning. The battle ended in a complete victory to Genoa, the details of which may still be read, inscribed on the façade of the church of St Matthew in that city. Sixty-six Venetian galleys were burnt in the Bay of Curzola, and eighteen were carried to Genoa, with 7000 prisoners, one of whom was Marco Polo. The captivity was of less than a year’s duration; for by the mediation of Milan peace was made, on honourable terms for both republics, by July 1299; and Marco Polo was probably restored to his family during that or the following month.

But his captivity was memorable as being the means of bringing about the record of his remarkable experiences in the East. Up to this time he had doubtless often related his stories of Cathay among his friends; and from these stories indeed, and the frequent employment in them (as it would seem) of a numerical expression unfamiliar in those days, he had acquired the nickname of Marco

Millioni. Yet it would seem that he had committed nothing to writing.

The narratives not only of Marco Polo but of several other famous mediaeval travellers (e.g., Ibn Batuta, Friar Odoric, Nicolo Conti) seem to have been extorted from them by a kind of pressure, and committed to paper by other hands. This indicates indeed how little the literary ambition which besets so many modern travellers weighed with the class in those days. It is also perhaps an example of that intense dislike to the use of pen and ink which still prevails among ordinary respectable folk on the shores of the Mediterranean.

But, in the prison of Genoa, Marco Polo fell in with a certain person of writing propensities, Rusticiano or Rustichello of Pisa, who also was a captive of the Genoese. His name is known otherwise to literary antiquaries as that of a respectable kind of literary hack, who abridged and recast several of the French romances of the Arthurian cycle which were then in fashion. He it was, apparently, who persuaded Marco Polo to defer no longer the committal to paper of his wonderful experiences. In any case it was he who wrote down these experiences at Marco’s dictation; and he is the man therefore to whom we owe the existence of this record, and possibly the preservation even of the traveller’s name and memory.

We learn but little of Marco Polo’s personal or family history after this captivity; but we know that at his death he left a wife, Donata by name (perhaps of the family of Loredano, but this is uncertain), and three daughters, Fantina and Bellela married, the former to Marco Bragadino, and Moreta then a spinster, but married at a later date to Ranuzzo Dolfino. One last glimpse of the traveller is gathered from his will, which is treasured in the library of St Mark’s. On the 9th January 1324 the traveller, now in his seventieth year, and sinking day by day under bodily infirmity, sent for a neighbouring priest and notary to make his testament. We do not know the exact time of his death, but it fell almost certainly within the year 1324, for we know from a scanty series of documents, commencing in June 1325, that he had at the latter date been some time dead. He was buried in accordance with his will, in the church of St Lorenzo, where the family burying-place was marked by a sarcophagus, erected by his filial care for his father Nicolo, which existed till near the end of the 16th century. On the renewal of the church in 1592 this seems to have been cast aside and lost.

The copious archives of Venice have yielded up a few traces of our traveller. Besides his own will just alluded to, there are in the library the wills of his uncle Marco and of his younger brother Maffeo; a few legal documents connected with the house property in St John Chrysostom, and other papers of similar character; and two or three entries in the record of the Maggior Consiglio. We have mentioned the sobriquet of Marco Millioni which he got from his young townsmen. Ramusio tells us that he had himself noted the use of this name in the public books of the commonwealth, and this statement has been verified of late years in one of those entries in the books of the Great Council (dated 10th April 1305), which records as one of the securities in a certain case the “Nobilis vir March,us Paulo Milion.” It is alleged that long after the traveller’s death there was always in the Venetian masques one individual who assumed the character of Marco Millioni, and told Munchausen-like stories to divert the vulgar. Such, if this be true, was the honour of our great man in his own country. One curious parchment among those preserved is the record of the judgment of the court of requests (Curia Petitionum) upon a suit brought by the “Nobilis Vir Marcus Polo” against Paulo Girardo, who had been an agent of his, to recover the value of a certain quantity of musk for which Girardo had not accounted. Another curious document brought to light within the last few years is a catalogue of certain curiosities and valuables which were collected in the house of the unhappy Marino Faliero, and this catalogue comprises several objects that Marco Polo had given to one of the Faliero family. Among these are two which would have been of matchless interest had they survived, viz.—“Unum anulum con inscriptione que dicit Cuibile Can Marco Polo, et unum torques cum multis animalibus Tartarorum sculptis que res donum dedit predictus Marcus quidam (cuidam) Fale-trorum.”

The most tangible record of Polo’s memory in Venice is a portion of the Ca’ Polo—the mansion (there is every reason to believe) where the three travellers, after their absence of a quarter century, were denied entrance. The court in which it stands was known in Ramusio’s time as the Corte, del Millioni, and now is called Corte Sabbionera. That which remains of the ancient edifice is a passage with a decorated archway of Italo-Byzantine character pertaining to the 13th century. With this exception, what was probably the actual site of the mansion is now occupied by the Malibran theatre.

No genuine portrait of Marco Polo exists. There is a medallion portrait on the wall of the Sala dello Scudo in the ducal palace, which has become a kind of type; but it is a work of imagination no older than 1761. The oldest professed portrait is one in the gallery of Monsignor Badia at Rome, which is inscribed Marcus Polus Venetus Totius Orbis et Indie Peregrator Primus. It is a good picture, but evidently of the 16th century at earliest, and the figure is of the character of that time. The Europeans at Canton have attached the name of Marco Polo to a figure in a Buddhist temple there containing a gallery of “Arhans” or Buddhist saints, and popularly known as the “temple of the five hundred gods.” There is a copy of this at Venice, which the Venetian municipality obtained on the occasion of the Geographical Congress there in 1881. But the whole notion was a groundless fancy.

The book indited by Rusticiano the Pisan, which has preserved Marco Polo’s fame, consists essentially of two parts. The first, or prologue, as it is termed, is the only part unfortunately which consists of actual personal narrative. It relates in a most interesting, though too brief, fashion the circumstances which led the two elder Polos to the khan’s court, with those of their second journey accompanied by Marco, and of the return to the West by the Indian seas and Persia. The second and staple part of the book consists of a long series of chapters of very unequal length and unsystematic structure, descriptive of the different states and provinces of Asia, with occasional notices of their sights and products, of curious manners and remarkable events, and especially regarding the emperor Kublai, his court, wars, and administration. A series of chapters near the close treats in a wordy and monotonous manner of sundry wars that took place between various branches of the house of Jenghiz in the latter half of the 13th century. This last series is either omitted or greatly curtailed in all the MS. copies and versions except one.

It was long a doubtful question in what language the work was originally written. That this had been some dialect of Italian was a natural presumption, and a contemporary statement could be alleged in its favour. But there is now no doubt that the original was French. This was first indicated by Count Baldelli-Boni, who published an elaborate edition of two of the Italian texts at Florence in 1827, and who found in the oldest of these indisputable signs that it was a translation from the French. The argument has since been followed up by others; and a manuscript in rude and peculiar French, belonging to the National Library of Paris, which was printed by the Société de Géographie in 1824, has been demonstrated (as we need not hesitate to say) to be either the original or a very close transcript of the original dictation. A variety of its characteristics are strikingly indicative of the unrevised product of dictation,'and are such as would necessarily have disappeared either in a translation or in a revised copy. Many illustrations could be adduced of the fact that the use of French was not a circumstance of a surprising or unusual nature; for the language had at that time, in some points of view, even a wider diffusion than at present, and examples of its literary employment by writers who were not Frenchmen are very numerous. It is superfluous to allege instances here, when we observe that Rusticiano himself, the scribe of the narrative, was a compiler of French romances.

Some eighty MSS. of the book are known, and their texts exhibit considerable differences. These fall under four principal types. Of these type i. is found completely only in that old French codex which has been mentioned. Type ii. is shown by several valuable MSS. in purer French, the best of which formed the basis of the edition prepared by the late Μ. Pauthier in 1865. It exhibits a text pruned ana revised from the rude original, but without any exactness, though perhaps under some general direction by Marco Polo himself, for an inscription prefixed to one of the MSS. records the presentation of a copy by the traveller himself to the Seigneur Thibault de Cepoy, a distinguished Frenchman known to history, at Venice in the year 1306. Type iii. is that of a Latin version prepared in Marco Polo’s lifetime, though without any sign of his cognizance, by Francesco Pipino, a Dominican of Bologna, and translated from an Italian copy. In this, condensation and curtailment are carried a good deal further than in type ii. Some of the forms under which this type appears curiously illustrate the effects of absence of effective publication, not only before the invention of the press, but in its early days. Thus the Latin version published by Grynaeus at Basel in the Novus Orbis (1532) is different in its language from Pipino’s, and yet is clearly traceable to that as its foundation. In fact it is a retranslation into Latin from some version of Pipino (Marsden thinks the Portuguese printed one of 1502). It introduces also changes of its own, and is quite worthless as a text; and it is curious that Andreas Muller, who in the 17 th century took much trouble with editing Polo according to his lights, should have unfortunately chosen as his text this fifth-hand version. It may be added that the French editions published in the middle of the 16th century were translations from Grynaeus’s Latin. Hence they complete this curious and vicious circle of translation —French, Italian, Pipino’s Latin, Portuguese, Grynaeus’s Latin, French.

The fourth type of text deviates largely from those already mentioned; its history and true character are involved in obscurity. It is only represented by the Italian version prepared for the press by G. B. Ramusio, with most interesting preliminary dissertations, and published at Venice two years after his death, in th

Polotesk or Poltesk is mentioned in 862 as one of the towns given by Rurik to his men, together with Byelo-ozero and Rostoff. In 980 it had a prince of its own, Rogvolod,‘whose daughter is the subject of many legends. It remained an independent principality until the 12th century, resisting the repeated attacks of the princes of Kieff; those of Pskoff, Lithuania, and the Livonian knights, however, proved more powerful, and it fell under Lithuanian rule in the following century. About 1385 its independence was destroyed by the Lithuanian prince Witowt. It was five times besieged by Moscow in 1500-18, and was taken by John the Terrible in 1563. Recaptured by Stephen Batory sixteen years later, it became Polish by the treaty of 1582. It was then a populous city, which, enjoying the privileges of “Magdeburg law” from 1498, carried on an active commerce, and covered a large area. Pestilences and conflagrations were its ruin; the plague of 1566 wrought great havoc among its inhabitants, and that ot 1600 destroyed 15,000. The castles, the town, and its walls were burned in 1607 and 1642. The Russians continued their attacks, burning and plundering the town, and twice taking possession of it for a few years, in 1633 and 1705. It was not definitively annexed, however, to Russia until 1772, after the first dismemberment of Poland. In 1812 its inhabitants resisted the French invasion, and the town was partially destroyed.